This is the last column for 2020. I remember writing early in 2020 what a satisfactory feel there was to the year 2020, a sense that somehow this was a year that would herald untold promise.
How wrong I was. As we all know, from February onwards, we had the pandemic in one shape or another, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes more freedom-giving, but always with the weight of the virus over us as we progressed through the year.
Yet, as we are on the cusp of 2021, we are also on the cusp of hope. Isn’t that just wonderful? Today, Tuesday, we heard on the radio that the first vaccine will be given to a 79-year-old woman called Annie from the Liberties in Dublin at 1.30pm. She lost her husband some months ago to COVID, and is full of life, waiting to get the vaccine and to begin to live her life again.
Now that is a great story for the beginning of 2021.
I hope you had a nice Christmas. I had a truly lovely one, and I am very content after my two days – Christmas Day with Aengus and his family, and St Stephen’s Day with Feargal and his family. What a joy to luxuriate in their friendship and love, and particularly to meet all the young people again.
The weather was good. We were able to come and go with no difficulty, and that in itself was an added bonus. But I understand there’s a likelihood now of frosty nights and, in some places, snow.
There was a lot that one could look at on all the various TV channels, but with talking a lot on both Christmas Day and Stephen’s Day, there was very little time for such viewing. However, on Christmas night, I was very happy to watch on TG4 an hour-long documentary on Maureen O’Hara, followed by a concert of The Dubliners. Now that was a grand way to round off Christmas 2020.
I always now look at TG4 when I am looking at the various TV stations and what they have to offer. Quite often, the surprise will be in the listing for TG4. They have really managed, I think, to grab the attention of viewers, particularly those of an older variety.
So, we are now facing into a vista of lockdowns. I will be content enough as long as they don’t force us into imprisonment and call it ‘cocooning’, like they did last March/April.
It will be enough for me that I will have the freedom of my car, to go out my front door and even take a little jaunt around the town to see how the rest of the world is coping.
Meanwhile, I must tell the readers of two wonderful books I got for Christmas from my family, one being ‘A Promised Land’ by Barack Obama, all 701 pages.
I am working my way through it. He is a very gifted writer and makes each chapter in the book seem like a new adventure, in which sometimes he wins out and sometimes he loses, but shining through it all is his determination to bring fair play to democracy in the US. It will take all of January for me to fully read it through, and I am looking forward to that task which will lift my mind from the lockdown strictures we are facing.
The second book is called ‘The Enigma of Arthur Griffith: Father of Us All’ by Colum Kenny. I am truly looking forward to this, but I won’t touch it until I have finished with the Barack Obama book. We hear very little in these years of centenaries of Arthur Griffith, the father of it all, and certainly, despite teaching history as I did, he remains an enigma in my mind. So I am looking forward, later on, to that read.
But above all, I wish everyone a peaceful 2021, and I share with you all the hope that our lives will be changed by modern medicine with the onset of the various vaccines. No doubt it will take some time to have them all fully assessed and to enable all of us to receive the necessary vaccines to allow us to continue our ordinary life in an ordinary way, free from the constant fear of contagion.
I would like to end this piece with some lines from a poem by the Irish poet Derek Mahon, who sadly died some few months ago. He calls the poem ‘Everything is Going to be All Right’. I will go through the poem to the last five lines:
The sun rises in spite of everything and the far cities are beautiful and bright. I lie here in a riot of sunlight watching the day break and the clouds flying. Everything is going to be all right.
Now isn’t that just so hopeful, so optimistic, and it stirs my heart even to see it written down and to hear it said. I think it would do us all good if we woke up each day and were able to say those lines out loud. I love to hear the words said in a loud, hopeful tone, finishing with “Everything is going to be all right.”
That is what I wish everyone for 2021: the Athlone Advertiser, its readers, and life in general in the Midlands and in the West of Ireland.
If we imbue our hearts with that thought, truly then everything will be all right.
That’s my lot for this week. Hope to talk with you all next week.
In the meantime, stay at home and stay safe, and think ahead to the vaccine coming.
Slán go fóill.
Mary O’Rourke
