It's rather apt that the Health Service Executive and the Technical Engineering and Electrical Trade Union should choose now to have a row involving the light bulbs in hospitals, Frank McNally
November 1st is the old Celtic Samhain, when our ancestors marked the end of summer and the beginning of the dark half of the year.
Under an ancient demarcation agreement, the druids lit ceremonial bonfires on this date to invite the waning sun's return in spring.
And as the inheritors of this tradition, the TEEU clearly feel the need to protect their magical powers of illumination.
Of course it is not mere bulbs that some of us need today. Many northern Europeans and sufferers from Seasonal Affective Disorder (Sad) will be plugging in their 10,000-Lux light-boxes from here on to counter the depression and lethargy that the long nights bring.
The 18th century English poet and humorist Thomas Hood may have been an undiagnosed Sad sufferer.
In any case, he said it all about this month in his poem "No!": "No sun - no moon!/No morn - no noon/No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day./No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,/No comfortable feel in any member/No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,/No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! - November!" In fact, for many Irish Times readers this year, that does not quite say it all.
As we face the latest November, there is no Brendan McWilliams either, to mitigate the gloom and explain away the symptoms of the month in his soothing bedside manner.
It must have been a triumph of optimism by the Celts to designate November 1st as New Year's Day (if indeed they did: there is some dispute about this). That they saw Samhain not only as the end of summer but also as a time for looking forward may explain the many fortune-telling traditions still associated with Halloween.
Romantic prospects for the coming year are a common feature in these. But some people will be more in sympathy today with Sarah Teasdale who, 90 Novembers ago, saw this month as a metaphor for lost love: "The world is tired, the year is old/The fading leaves are glad to die,/The wind goes shivering with cold/Where the brown reeds are dry. /Our love is dying like the grass,/And we who kissed grow coldly kind,/Half glad to see our old love pass/Like leaves along the wind." In contrast with its importance in Celtic calendar, the short-lived French revolutionary version designated November simply as Brumaire: the month of fog. Brumaire didn't even start today: being already 10 days old.
THE REVOLUTIONARIES' ONLY nod to the date's Celtic significance - under their system whereby each day is dedicated to a food, animal, or farm implement - was assigning November 1st to the "plough".
Brumaire separated Vendemaire (month of harvest) and Frimaire (month of frost). The trio observe the calendar's convention of having the same endings for each seasonal set: a system lampooned in England, where the revolutionaries' autumn months were dubbed "Wheezy", "Sneezy", and "Freezy".
As befits a writer so-named, Robert Frost saw the bright side of November, although his poem My November Guest dramatises a meeting with an annual visitor, "sorrow", who is said to love this time of year: "My sorrow when she's here with me,/Thinks these dark days of autumn rain/Are beautiful as days can be;/She loves the bare, the withered tree;/She walks the sodden pasture lane./Her pleasure will not let me stay./She talks and I am fain to list:/She's glad the birds are gone away,/She's glad her simple worsted gray/Is silver now with clinging mist." The poet's sorrow thinks the poet does not appreciate November's beauty: "The desolate, deserted trees/The faded earth, the heavy sky,/The beauties she so truly sees,/She thinks I have no eyes for these,/And vexes me for reason why." But in the final verse - confusingly for both Sad sufferers and psychiatrists alike - Frost claims to enjoy the month just as much as his "guest" does: "Not yesterday I learned to know/The love of bare November days/Before the coming of the snow,/But it were vain to tell her so,/And they are better for her praise."
Upbeat as this sentiment is, it is outdone - albeit indirectly - by Shakespeare.
It was on 1st November 1611 that The Tempest made its debut: appropriate timing for what is believed to have been his last play.
That it was a kind of farewell lends resonance to the words of Prospero - a character some see as representing the playwright himself - when he says, late in the piece: "Be cheerful, sir, our revels now have ended."
In that same passage, Prospero also utters the immortal line: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on/And our little life is rounded with a sleep."
But in this November message, Shakespeare seems to have been on the side of the Celts. By contrast with the slaughter that ends many of his plays, The Tempest concludes with the promise of a wedding.
And the bride-to-be, luminous as a light-box, strikes one of the most optimistic notes in all of literature when she marvels: "How beauteous mankind is! Oh brave new world that has such people in't!"