Whingeing about rain can help us to weather this storm
WE need to talk about the weather. There was a moment, back near the start of all this madness – at a time when people were still staggering around looking shellshocked and terrified – when a woman in my local newsagents, buying her morning paper, commented aloud that it ‘wasn’t a bad day out there’.
We all looked at her as if she had ten unmasked heads: how could anybody be thinking about the weather when the whole world was heading downhill in a handcart?
But she was right, of course. Because we need to talk about the weather. We are Irish; that is what we do. We give out about it most days, and on those rare shining mornings, we acknowledge aloud that this is indeed a beautiful day. But we have to say it out loud: commenting on the weather has to be one of the first sentences we say every day, and listening to other people’s comments on it needs to constitute most of the others. You could say it sets us up for the day.
I think, in this maelstrom of fear and uncertainty, we have forgotten to talk about the weather.
Somehow, we have managed to let our national obsession with the prevailing meteorological conditions slide. And that’s not good for our heads or for our hearts.
We are craving a return to normality – but we have mistaken structures such as pubs and schools for the vital cornerstones of our identity. They’re important, of course – and I think we can all agree that reopening the schools on time is essential – but what sets us apart from other people, what settles us into our communities and our country, is our relentless need to discuss the weather. And that is not being currently served.
Think about it: as you’ve eyed strangers balefully in the park and estimated the distance between you, have you once muttered that the rain has held off, or that it’s warmer than you’d expected? Have you ever shared the glad tidings about conditions improving for the weekend through your mask? I was on a beautiful beach in Kerry a few weeks ago where discussing whether the top of Mount Brandon is visible – a local predictor of imminent good weather – is a mandatory conversation piece (in two different languages) as strangers pass each other. But that day, one of our naval ships was in the bay and nobody mentioned that you could see the tip of Brandon. ‘There must be a war coming’ was as close as we got to banter on the beach.
And among the hundred things that currently have us in bad form, I think neglecting our weather conversations might be a significant contributor. I want to have and I want to hear those indignant conversations in my local shops again, where people protest bitterly that ‘this isn’t what they said on the weather forecast last night’. I want to hear jubilation in people’s voices when the sun comes out when it wasn’t supposed to. I want to read those absolutely ridiculous news reports about people complaining to Met Éireann because they washed their nets on Tuesday because Jean Byrne said it would be a good day. I want us to get all het up about the weather because the stuff we’re getting het up about now is too sad and too depressing for our own mental health to handle.
And because this too will pass. However long it takes, whether it ends in a vaccine or a victory, a day will come when we won’t wake up to NPHET or numbers. A morning will dawn when we’ll look out the window and instead of a virus, we’ll think about Evelyn Cusack lying to us about a bright start, and we won’t be able to wait to stumble down to the shops to share our lividness with all the people we meet there. We can do that now. I am writing this in the first tentative moments of hopeful sunshine after 30 hours of non-stop rain in Dublin.
I could have had a lot to say about that. So I think I’ll start. A miserable day deserves to be remarked upon, even if it’s through a three-ply mask, and a good day still deserves a socially distant thumbs-up. There is no health risk in talking about the weather again and I think it would do us all good to resume those conversations, that beloved old normal. Because Covid won’t always be with us – but our unreliable, infuriating, baffling, glorious weather will. And hallelujah for that.