CAVANMAN'S DIARY: Chilling out with the zombies!

Paul Fitzpatrick

Greetings from tropical Virginia. How are things where you are?

Around here, winter is coming and the evenings are getting a little chillier. Last Wednesday was the hardiest night yet – outside, that is. Inside, my living room resembled a microwave, turned on to the highest setting.

I should have seen it coming, this cold snap. They say animals have a sixth sense and can detect these things and I think my wife's useless cat  - whom you may recall spends her days variously sleeping or focusing on her work as a peace envoy to the rodent community – had heard rumours about the thermometer plummeting.

She wasn't for budging that morning when I shoved her out the door, anyway, throwing me a look that was cooler than her expensive array of bespoke collars and harder than any frost.

That surprised me because the night before, Tuesday, had been comparitively warm – or so it seemed to me, anyway – and clocked in at a balmy 12 degrees. 

I know this because, baking from the inside out like a turkey on Christmas morning, I checked it online at the time, frantically googling in case my phone would melt before I had ascertained the actual temperature. 

I needed to know because I was beginning to doubt my own sanity when my better half told me through chattering teeth that she was – and I quote - “freeeeezing”. 

The context is important. She imparted this information – in, it should be noted, an accusatory tone - from her station in front of the fire, under a blanket, swaddled in a dressing gown, while I sat on the far end of the couch in shorts and t-shirt (no word of a lie).

Now, maybe I am just a warm person (not in spirit, clearly) but I cannot understand the obsession many of these heat-seekers seem to display. And I don't just mean women, although they are invariably foundered, as we say in these parts.

No, it's the general standing army of the unthawed, of both sexes, that I cannot relate to. "

The more oven-like it is for a lot of these lunatics, the better. There can never be enough coal on the fire nor enough layers of clothing on their backs. To them, out of the fying pan and into the fire is not a cliché but a dream.

Even when it's clearly too hot, well, it's not hot enough.

One household I know are notorious for it. They have a pot-bellied stove, constantly loaded with firewood, which leaves their living room feeling like the centre of the earth, in a heatwave.

Many's the night I have walked in there to find the family strewn around the room like zombies in the netherworld, unable to utter but a few low syllables.

“Hello,” I say breezily, once the initial shock has subsided and I am beginning to break a nice sweat.

“Uggggh,” the half-dead groan in my direction, eyes almost closed, energy drained.

I can usually stick it out for about 10 minutes (I think my record is 15) before I have to go outside and undress to cool down, amid pained cries of “shut the door!”.

I often tell them to not bother with any form of heating in the house. Yes, it would, like now, be unbearable at times but at least it would be unbearable and free – currently, keeping that furnace topped up is a costly business, I imagine.

Then again, that may be just the miser coming out in me, I admit, but as the title of this column tells you, I am a Cavanman through and through and proud of it.

So proud, in fact, that when I retire, millions made, and relocate with her good self to warmer climes, I intend returning home every year. 

Flights from Siberia, they reckon, have never been cheaper.

Postscript

A regular highlight of the national conversation, the travelling community, came up again this week with presidential candidate Peter Casey getting blasted by all and sundry for his comments about them.

On Twitter, someone asked the question if any travellers had ever represented their counties in senior football or hurling (they have, Wicklow hurler Andy O'Brien being the most latest example).

Someone else tagged me in and mentioned Willie Doonan, one of the Cavan heroes from the Polo Grounds All-Ireland final success in 1947. Of course, Doonan did not come from travelling stock, even through it was commonly held that he did.

Brendan Ó hEithir’s memoir Over The Bar perpetuated this myth and over the years it would be reported as fact on several occasions. In 1995, 19 years after Doonan’s death at the age of 56, a contributor to The Anglo-Celt, long-standing official of renown Andy O’Brien (namesake of the aforementioned Wicklow hurler, by freakish coincidence), was so moved that he went to the trouble of researching Doonan’s family history as far back as the marriage of his greatgrandparents, James Dempsey and Mary Burns, in October, 1849.

His parents, John Doonan and Mary Dempsey, he discovered, were married in 1911.

"This proves,” wrote the letter-writer, “that Willie Doonan was NOT a member of the Travelling community.”