MY THANKS to the many readers who have taken trouble to enlighten me about “hash weather”, which it turns out was not a short-lived micro-climate occurring exclusively in the writings of Flann O’Brien/Myles na Gopaleen during the winter of 1960.
I now know that the phenomenon has been identified over many decades and in locations as far apart as Wicklow and east Galway. It has also been witnessed in Westmeath, Kildare, Kilkenny, and Laois. And although most reports do at least support my assumption that the term is no longer in wide usage, I’m assured that it’s alive and well in Carlow, where it was used in Tinryland GAA club as recently as “the other night”.
Almost all correspondents agree that weather so described involves wind, not rain. Typically it’s a wind that blows from the north or east, or in Carlow, “from over the Blackstairs mountain”. At any rate, it refers to cold, dry, blustery conditions of a kind often seen in late March, before spring sets in properly. Far from what “hash weather” might suggest, it is not sympathetic to the cultivation of cannabis plants, or anything else.
Those readers who deigned to express an opinion on its origins also agree that “hash” is probably a corruption of “harsh”. Indeed I’m told of a GAA commentator in the midlands who, when a free is given for no good reason, is wont to suggest the referee was “very hash there”.
And there is an undeniable logic to this which may be demonstrated, with apologies to Myles’s catechism of cliché, thus:
Q: What quasi-meteorological phenomenon was said to have emanated from the referee’s whistle?
A: A blast.
Q: Yes, but a blast of which piercing, high-pitched quality, suggestive of wind conditions in late spring?
A: A shrill blast.
MY ATTENTIONhas also been drawn to a 2010 column by this newspaper's etymologist Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, in which he discussed the word "bask", as used on the Ards peninsula of Co Down. This too describes a day of dry, withering wind, destructive to vegetation.
Hence a colourful Ards phrase: “She’s as bitter as a bask apple.” Diarmaid mentioned the word “hask” too, which has a similar meaning.
And one might assume “hask” and “bask” to be linguistic cousins: each a breakaway from the same root (Ards being a case of bask separatism, if you like). But no. Diarmaid insists the words have different lineages, although he notes that “hask” is indeed a member of the “harsh” family.
And of the latter, in a footnote to his column, he added: “There are many dialectal variations, including the Wexford hash, not recorded elsewhere, if we are to believe the English Dialect Dictionary.” I can’t let the last sentence go without saying that “Wexford hash” sounds like something you might see for sale on roadsides, alongside strawberries and potatoes. But that apart, if we are to believe my readers, hash weather has certainly been recorded outside Wexford. And it may not be too much of an exaggeration to paraphrase Joyce and say that it is, or used to be, general all over Ireland.
IT'S OFTENsaid of Flann O'Brien that his work, by complete contrast with Joyce's, has escaped serious critical attention. There are even people – serious critics, mostly – who think this is a bad thing.
But as of today, it appears the great man may finally have run out of luck. The 45th anniversary of his death seems certain to unleash a frenzy of academic interest, climaxing with his 100th birthday in October, when there will be duelling seminars about him in UCD and Trinity. After that, I fear, an annual summer school cannot be ruled out.
The season's first shots have already been fired with the publication of a book called Is it about a bicycle?: Flann O'Brien in the Twenty-First Century. This is a collection of 10 essays, nine of them by eminent scholars (in the interests of balance, they also asked me to write one). And I don't think I'm ruining the plot for readers when I answer the question in the title. No, the book is not about a bicycle, really.
It does, however, tackle other important subjects, such as the traditional disregard by critics for the largest single part of O'Brien's work: his epic Irish Timescolumn, Cruiskeen Lawn. This was of course written as Myles na gCopaleen (later Gopaleen), a name its author translated as "Myles of the ponies" rather than "Myles of the little horses", because as he put it, "the sovereignty of the pony should not be subjugated by the imperialism of the horse".
But there is a similar imperialism at work in the fact that this author of many identities is now most widely known as “Flann O’Brien”, under which name he wrote only two (good) books at the start of his career and two (less good) at the end. In the bibliocentric world view, 26 years of columns in between are written off because, as Jon Day asks in his essay: “How can it be art one day and used to wrap fish and chips the next?” The column is increasingly being seen as Flann O’Brien’s true masterpiece, however. And as Day points out, technology is helping. To date, published collections have diminished the original material by editing and arranging it in ways quite foreign to how it first appeared.
Now digitisation allows readers to see it in its Edenic state. And the next stage – Day hopes – will be the creation of what he calls a “wiki-lawn” on which new generations of readers can romp.
Similar insights are offered by at least nine of the essays in Is It About a Bicycle?: Flann O'Brien in the Twenty-first Century, which is edited by Jennika Baines and published by Four Courts Press.