Ben Lowry: The ancient Irish were right about the joy of February and the start of spring

(Click here to read Ben Lowry’s main column on more wildly erratic behaviour from Donald Trump)​

It was sunny yesterday, a perfect last day of the first month of spring or, if you stick with the more widely held tradition, a prelude to the first day of meteorological spring, March 1.

I tend to side with the ancient Irish on this one. February might (just) be the coldest month of the year, thus the height of winter, but it is also the month in which we move from the deep and enveloping darkness of December and January to the bright month of March.

The sun now rises at just after 7am and it doesn’t get properly dark until after 6pm yet in early January those times are closer to 9am and 4pm respectively.

And also, this uplifting burst of sunshine is not surprising, given the very long grey spell that Ulster had in February, indeed one of the longest ever such spells, 11 days of little or no sun. In most of NI the sun shines for about one third of daylight hours, and therefore if you have an 11-day spell of no sun you need a 5-day spell of sun to get back to average … Of course it rarely works out as neatly as that, and yet in the middle and latter parts of February it almost did.

Now we are in a joyous point in the calendar: four months of ever expanding daylight until late June.

• Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor