Well thankfully last week we had a most welcome diversion from the ongoing tale of woes about the economy and all those poor public servants getting hit with levies, thank God for Punxsutawney Phil. He took our minds off that shite for a week. Phil is a groundhog: he’d be a swanky well-fed distant relative of our own humble, prickly, depressed-looking Irish hedgehog. A hedgehog that took the boat during the bad times did well for himself in America and turned his prickly coat into something more exotic.
Well every year the Yanks out there in Pittsburgh — Pateen Tom Dickie had a sister out there, Maura, some goer was Maura, very popular at the dances she was. Pittsburgh, sure it wasn’t much of a name to put on a place was it — anyway, out in Punxsutawney, Pittsburgh, groundhog Phil can predict the length of winter. If he sees his shadow when they bring him out in February then winter will last another six weeks and sure no surprises for guessing the result this year. He saw his shadow, so it’s another six weeks of winter for the Yanks. Well you’ll have often heard it said that when America sneezes the rest of us here in Europe catch a bad flu or the feckin’ pneumonia, so it’s six feckin’ weeks of really bad weather that’s ahead of us for sure.
Anyway the Punxsutawney locals didn’t seem to be too bothered by Phil’s shadow, they turned out in big numbers for the event as did a lot of visiting tourists, and made a day and night out of it afterwards. And sure why wouldn’t they, what’s the feckin’ point in being miserable when you could be havin’ the craic, sharing how miserable you are with someone else and makin’ them miserable too: nothin’ like a good moan to lighten the load.
So it got me thinkin’ so it did.
It’s past time we got something like Hedgehog day going here in the village as a way of getting tourists into this place in February. We could release a gang of hedgehogs onto the main road at night and allow them roam freely between the stone walls while a hundred cars are driven along that stretch of road. If less than half of the hedgehogs survived we’d know it would be a shite summer.
There could be some jobs created for local farmers raising hedgehogs for the event and sure it wouldn’t be beyond the expertise of FÁS to put on a few courses to train people on how to train hedgehogs in some traffic avoidance techniques. The poor aul’ hedgehog has been flattened all over our roads for years, it’s time we trained these lovely animals in some techniques for self-preservation.
I was tellin’ aul Paddy Hanley about the idea and he was tellin’ me that his grand uncle Red Mike used to predict the weather years ago. Seemingly Red Mike used to walk out bollock naked on St Brigid’s morning and roll from one end of the high field to the other while singing the Tantum Ergo. If he ended up coming out in a rash it was a sign of bad summer or as Paddy put it “that the f***in poison was still in the ground”.
Sure poor aul’ Red Mike paid for his going on, didn’t he end up dying of pneumonia and him only 50 years of age. Anyway God rest Red Mike, let’s get working on Village Hedgehog Day.
