According to age-old tradition, the winds on St Patrick's Day always follow a prescribed pattern. In the highlands of Scotland, it seems, St Patrick is as much honoured as he is here, his feast day being regarded as the first day of spring.
For these reasons, it is Patrick's custom to depart for the Hebrides on the morning of 17th to visit his distant parishioners and, to make the journey easier, he arranges for himself to have a following southerly wind.
Later in the day, he arranges that the wind be northerly to facilitate his return journey.
Irish tradition, on the other hand, has it that today is the middle, rather than the beginning of, the spring.
The old Irish saying goes "La Fheile Padraig i lar an earraigh, mar ata an cnamh i lar an scadain" - "St Patrick's Day sits in the middle of spring like the bone in the middle of a herring."
At face value, I suppose, the meaning is that our national holiday, occurring 6 1/2 weeks after February 1st, the traditional first day of spring, marks the halfway point of that season.
It could also be construed, however, as a reference to the fact that the weather of March, and particularly of St Patrick's Day itself, is notoriously volatile, often bringing a harsh, unwelcome and sometimes surprising interruption to the progress of a season that has otherwise been waxing increasingly benign.
Not, of course, that a little harshness in the weather at this time of year is necessarily a bad thing. Our Irish ancestors used to say that:
Sioc soineann an earraigh
Is e a liontas fearrantai le stor;
B'fhearr cith cloch shneachta i dtus an Aibreain
Na leathadh an aige in de or.
Roughly translated, the advice might read as follows:
Bright frosts in spring will never fail
To bring more crops than the fields can hold;
An early April shower of hail
Is better than half a sea of gold.
Our national saint himself, however, was largely independent of the weather and had his own way of coping with the elements:
Saint Patrick, as in legends told,
The morning being very cold,
In order to assuage the weather,
Collected bits of ice together;
He gently breathed upon the pyre,
And every fragment blazed on fire!