Remembering the 'beast from the east'

Cavanman's Diary

Today's first snow of the new year has prompted memories of the so-called 'beast from the east', the snowstorm which hit three years ago next month.

The following column was published in The Anglo-Celt at the time.

Big snow’s-a-comin’, they said sombrely. Nothing for it, then, but to wrap up warm and watch it develop from the comfort of the couch.

Being the type of annoying person who views second-hand knowledge as power, early last week I appointed myself as unofficial storm spokesman among my friends and gobbled up whatever information I could find, regurgitating it whole later on.

By Tuesday, I could state with confidence what would happen and when. The key finding from my robust googling was that 25mm of precipitation, when it falls as snow, is roughly equivalent to 30cm of the white stuff. Armed with that nugget, I fired off a few texts predicting what would happen and settled smugly to wait while I was proven right.

On Wednesday morning, I paid a final visit to the Anglo-Celt’s former home at Station House. All was calm, if incredibly cold, around Cavan Town but by the time I hit Lavey on the way home, the scene resembled a snow globe in Siberia.

Then again, having read up on the Irish phenomenon of localised weather patterns, I had a feeling it would, I informed my Whatsapp group. Their response is unprintable. Suffice to say, I laid off the amateur weather man stuff for a while.

By that evening, things had worsened. In the middle of it all that evening, a video popped up on the Celt website showing a man crossing the road, at the corner of College St and the Barrack Hill in Cavan Town, while wearing shorts.

“Not if Ophelia and Storm Emma had a love child would this man wear trousers,” read the caption. Depressingly, given that there were many more worthy, informative stories on anglocelt.ie that day, that one was by far the most popular and widely-shared.

That’s the nature of the beast, I suppose – and not the one from the east whose arrival we had been awaiting with a sense of, well, certainly not dread... I would say, in my case anyway, it was intrigue. How bad would this get?

And while we all got cabin fever, you’d have to feel for the journos, print and broadcast, who were trying to attract eyeballs and eardrums to their stories in the days leading up to the white-out. Of the ones I saw, the Irish Independent took the honours, with a headline on their website screaming “Status Red Shutdown”.

As an SRS virgin, I didn’t know how I should react to this impending Sneachtageddon. Should I position myself at the window, yard-brush in hand, ready to defend my property? Maybe but government had imposed a curfew of sorts, warning us to stay indoors from 4pm - or else.

The country was talking about nothing other than the weather. Schools were closed, sporting fixtures were cancelled and the “American salt guy”, Sean O’Neill of the NRA, was omnipresent, explaining about the millions of tonnes of grit which had been stockpiled. And then there was the ludicrous run on bread supplies, which caught us all by surprise.

“Very sad,” Irish Times scribe Damian Cullen tweeted. “Saw a guy buying 100 grams of ciabatta on street corner tonight. Home-made. Who knows how it was mixed or how pure the flour was. But he didn't care. He was desperate. Snow was up to his ankles.”

And then, on Thursday morning, scanning through Twitter for the 1000th time in 24 hours, I noticed a post from the razor sharp Paschal Sheehy. The night before, I watched RTE’s Southern Correspondent, ruddy-cheeked and with a frosting of, well, frost on his fringe, report from a bitterly cold Cork.

He reminded me very much of the character Frankie Carbone (to whom Sheehy bears more than a passing similarity) in Martin Scorsese’s classic Goodfellas. He (Frankie, not Paschal) was the gangster, you may recall, who met his maker in the back of a frozen meat lorry.

“When they found Carbone in the meat truck,” the narrator tells us, “he was frozen so stiff it took them two days to thaw him out for the autopsy.”

Anyway, Sheehy’s tweet took the honours for stating the bleeding obvious.

“In case you have missed it,” he wrote, “we have a Met Eireann status red weather warning for heavy snow and high winds in place for the whole country today and into tomorrow...”

So, yeah, things were getting repetitive. Around 11.30am on Thursday morning, we reached peak snow talk on the Dermot and Dave Show on Today FM with the presenters debating whether it was politically correct to say ‘eskimo’ or ‘Inuit’.

By now, it was fairly bad and, we were told incessantly, Worse Was To Come. Around noon, I ventured out to the shop. “What did you get?” my wife asked when I returned triumphantly.

“Frostbite,” I said, unloading the chocolate, newspapers and extra chocolate.

That would be it, then, for the next 24 hours. Perched in front of the fire, there was no budging only to peep through the curtains intermittently and mutter gravely about how bad it was.

You’d have to wonder, though, about some people who didn’t heed the warnings. On Thursday night, a metre of snow fell in the Dublin mountains; it is an understatement to say that it had been well flagged on the apocalyptic rolling TV coverage.

A friend of mine works at Johnnie Fox’s, the self-styled ‘highest pub in Ireland’, in that neck of the woods, which was more or less cut off from the outside world (he was at home at the time, unfortunately, or fortunately, whatever way you want to look at it).

On Friday morning, he told me about a pair of what he called ‘snow hunters’ who had driven up to Glencullen, beside Fox’s, to see what all the fuss was about – then steered straight into a five feet high drift, had to abandon their car and were very lucky to make it back to civilisation.

So, if you’re thinking of belly-aching about the storm being blown out of all proportion – no pun intended – remember those day-trippers and think again. Yes, Ophelia wasn’t as bad as first feared in many areas but three people still lost their lives.

These sort of phenomena are going to become more common; heed the warnings and put up with the boredom. You never know, you might even enjoy it.