Storm Fergus followed Storm Elin. A tornado hit Leitrim Village, damaging buildings and wrecking cars (including a cousin-in-law’s) on the main street. Walking around town in the storm (nearly losing the dog to a gale), I feel exhilarated down to my toes. I must be part otter, albeit disguised as a sailor in navy duffle coat, black jeans, black Aran jumper, yellow beanie, and, er, pigtails.

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Saturday night: I attend a cattle mart on the edge of town. We perch on rickety wooden bleachers overlooking a large pen, rails draped in tinsel and fairy lights and thronged by bidders, in which fluffy blow-dried heifers are paraded as an auctioneer drones figures into a microphone. Sometimes a vendor hands a twenty to the auctioneer to pass to the buyer for luck. Elsewhere, in a byzantine warren of pens heaped with hay, farmers inspect their animals or confer with cronies over paper cups of steaming milky tea, while children in puffy gilets, tracksuit bottoms, and wellies dash along aisles, chug soda, stare into phones. Before entering the mart, the husband instructs me not to take photos, "like a tourist".

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Sunday: another session in the wee sauna, with S again. S is an artist on a month-long residency in our town. Half-Finnish and half-Turkish Cypriot, she grew up in London. She tells me of the importance of saunas in Finnish culture (every household has one), and of the serious disposition of her Cypriot family (all the women on one side of her father’s family were murdered by Greeks in the 1970s).

A consummate painter, S is always commenting on the landscape, especially its colours: look at the gold on the tops of those trees; there isn’t a lot of purple right now, maybe it’s the time of year; oh, the light on the mountain! Sometimes in winter, I forget how to look at my environment. It’s all so grey, until someone else points out what you’ve been missing, only because you aren’t paying enough attention. And then the world has just a bit more depth and possibility.

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