Sunbathing in October ...it’s great, isn’t it? Well, no, actually

I’M just pointing out that if the Lotto jackpot rolls over much longer, I’ll have spent €19million on tickets.

LATE Monday morning, I pulled on my shorts and a bikini top and sat in the sunshine in my garden for a couple of hours. My phone told me it was 18C. More difficult to believe was that it also told me it was October 18.

My personal, highly unscientific measure of climate change is nonetheless a reliable one.

My birthday falls slap-bang in the middle of September.

When I was a child, I always returned to school a fortnight before the glorious day wearing battered summer sandals and ankle socks. But by the time my birthday rolled around, I was in knee socks and shoes.

I remember that vividly, in the way all children remember their birthdays and what they wore. Summer clothes on September 1; winter clothes by the 16th. Every year without fail.

I put my summer clothes away last weekend and replaced them in my wardrobe with the winter woollies that spend their summers in a bag on the top shelf. But I kept back a couple of pairs of shorts and bikini tops, because these years, you know not the day nor the hour. As it happened, the day and hour came a scant 24 hours later, in the second half of October, when I topped up my tan for a couple of hours in the garden.

I wasn’t the only one making the most of the unseasonal sunshine. That afternoon, I brought my mother for a hospital appointment, and as usual on days like these, the benches outside the hospital were occupied by elderly patients and visitors all enjoying the weather. As we passed, I could hear their conversations: ‘Beautiful day’, ‘You don’t expect this in October’, ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’

And even though I was still in my shorts (you’ll be relieved to know the bikini top had been replaced by more formal attire), I wanted to stop and correct them. Because however good it might have felt on our skin and in our long-programmed brains, Monday wasn’t a beautiful, wonderful day. It was a terrible day – an 18C chilling reminder of what scientists have been telling us for decades now: that our planet is cooking and that all life upon it is facing the most serious threat we’ve ever known.

I know a lot of people – particularly older people – believe that the looming environmental catastrophe is certainly beyond our individual control and probably beyond any tiny splash in the giant global pond our small country is capable of mustering. But for as long as there is a disconnect between how we respond to sweltering days in late autumn and our level of climate emergency awareness, then we are never collectively going to address the rapidly approaching crisis. As long as we respond to rising carbon taxes by complaining to Joe about heating our homes or filling our cars, we set the Earth back a little further. Our heads are in the sand – and as long as that sand is on a sunny beach after the kids have returned to school, we really don’t seem to mind too much.

IAM as guilty of this disconnect as the next vitamin D-craving Irish person. I’d love to tell you that I saw the mercury rise on Monday and thought: ‘Oh no.’ But even as I enjoyed the warming sunshine on my skin, I did know that this wasn’t right, that this wasn’t so much a gift from the gods as a dire warning from a wheezing, grieving planet. I am a hypocrite only insofar as I made the most of the sunshine. Like a good Catholic of an earlier generation, I can honestly say I didn’t take any pleasure from it.

Like most Irish people over the past few years, I’ve probably been guilty of flippantly throwing out remarks like: ‘If this is global warming, bring it on.’ That’s the kind of comment I’ve heard before from the grateful inhabitants of the benches outside the hospital. But I don’t say that anymore, and when strangers do foolishly greet me with a ‘nice day’ in the second half of October, I no longer agree. ‘It isn’t really,’ is now my (unwelcome) reply. ‘We’re not supposed to get days like this.’ How to lose friends but hopefully influence people. It’s not easy. A lifetime of being Irish, hardwired to be grateful for every chink of warm sunshine, makes it almost impossible for us to acknowledge these portents for the warnings they are.

But we need to start making the effort to join the dots on climate disaster. By all means make the most of unseasonal sunshine on your skin, but remember that nobody told us there’d be days like these for good reason: there aren’t supposed to be days like these. There shouldn’t be days like these.