December's rain and wind are bearable with Christmas to look forward to, but in the cold, dark, muddy early days of the new year, the deliverance of spring seems an eternity away. It must surely have been January when Hamlet said: "How weary, stale, dull, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world". Or as our ancestors used to put it:
The blackest month in all the year
It is the month of Janiveer.
January was named by the Romans after their god Janus, whose CV was ideally suited to his appointment as custodian of the crossroads of the year. He was also the door-keeper of heaven, a kind of pre-Christian St Peter of the pearly gates. His divine responsibilities included the "beginnings and ends" of anything one cared to undertake, and he was credited with the dual knack of both knowing all about the past and being able to see the future.
For this reason, he was represented in painting and sculpture as bifrons, or two-faced, looking both forwards and backwards simultaneously.
Meteorologically, January and February are the coldest months of our northern hemisphere year. The Atlantic westerlies are most active at this time; depressions, as indeed we have seen recently, are frequent, large and vigorous, and bring us rain and storms regularly - and more often than not during January, a spell of snow as well.
Indeed, this month shares with December the doubtful honour of being the wettest and windiest month of the Irish year and, with February, is the month in which snow is most likely. Except for a few places near the west and south coasts, where they hardly ever have it anyway, snow falls on average on five or six of January's 31 days.
On an typical January day in Ireland, the temperature rises to about 7C in the north, and to nine or 10 in the south and south-west. Ground frost is frequent; in a normal year, the ground temperature is below zero on more than half the mornings in January, and in many inland areas even the air temperature - that measured four feet above the ground - is below the freezing point on up to 10 mornings of the month.
By mid-January the sea temperature around our coast will have fallen to 7 or 8C - in sharp contrast to the 13 or 14 degrees typical of July or August.