The spells of nice weather are enough to drive us all mad
TEN days ago it was winter; five days ago it was summer. No wonder we’re all so peculiar. Here’s a word to describe the Irish weather over the last fortnight: tiring. The weather has been great; the weather has been awful, the weather’s pretty grey at the time of writing and it will probably be terrible at the time of reading. But then again it’s due to be lovely later this week.
Never mind 800 years of oppression, it is the Irish weather that has given us our history of shattered hopes, unrelieved gloom and the odd, maddening shaft of joy.
Even when the weather is wonderful, our relationship with it is unhealthily intense, because we have to gather our rosebuds while we may. During any significant spell of sunshine, you could be deafened, as we were last week, by the noise of a nation hysterically making the best of it.
We are all familiar with the grey skies that never end, the type of freezing hail that shook our houses and cars only a fortnight ago, and the frosts that continue into June. But that’s not the tough part.
The tough part is actually the summer sunshine, which arrives unexpectedly, like an angel, and temporarily transforms our country into a place where the living is easy.
Naturally we go crazy. We stumble out into the open pasture like pit ponies on a day pass.
In an ideal climate we could rely on the fact that our joy would be unconfined. But we know that our joy is very confined indeed, when you’re dealing with beautiful weather in Ireland.
Meetings abandoned, trouser legs rolled up and the national mobile turned to silent – we’ve got to do whatever it takes, for as long as it lasts.
BECAUSE it could all be snatched away – and indeed it was snatched away – at any moment. There is an argument to be made to the effect that in Ireland we don’t really have the concept of an early summer. We don’t have the time. If it’s sunny then it’s the summer and we have to belt out the door to do our summer things immediately, and as hard as we can.
It was hotter than Barcelona. It was hotter than Malta. On Wednesday night, after three dizzying days of sunshine, in Dublin at least, all the signs of the traditional Irish summer ecstasy were already in place: RTÉ sent a film crew out all the way to Sandycove to record children dutifully building sandcastles, and interviewed some of them.
The Sandycove footage was intercut with footage of little children making sandcastles on, if I’m not mistaken, Bunbeg beach in Co. Donegal, just in front of Ostan Gweedore.
Of course, the Donegal kids weren’t interviewed, and the location was not specified – not on the Six One News at any rate.
That’s just the way it’s always been, every summer: God forbid that the people outside Dublin were ever spoken to about anything but a farming story or possibly a fishing tragedy; and also, God forbid that the television news actually explained anything to us.
But of course, on Wednesday night most people weren’t watching television, what with the gardening and the dog walking and the sunbathing and the sports.
There were the scores of runners in the Phoenix Park. The drinkers were lined up sitting on the banks of the canal outside the Barge pub on Dublin’s Charlemont Street – as sure a sign of summer as the first swallow.
Bald men worried about their scalps getting burned.
Somebody somewhere was play- ing frisbee and pretending they were in California. Quite a few people were wondering if it was too early in the year to switch from red wine to rosé (apparently so).
Bewildered women all over the country were asking themselves the most urgent question of a traditional Irish summer: can you get away with wearing wintery black opaques in the summer heat (yes), and if a woollen scarf was too much in the sunshine (unfortunately, yes) and whether boots are too much in good weather (it depends).
IRELAND looks so beautiful in the sunshine; we look around us and wonder what we would be like if it was sunny all the time, or even for three months of the year. We talk about this a lot. That’s another tradition of the Irish summer. Different, we say. We’d be very different.
Ice cream plays a crucial role in both days of an Irish summer. We have to have it, you see, to cope with the merciless heat. And our ice cream-eating window is pretty small.
Last week, HB released the news that it was relaunching its old Freaky Foot ice pop.
Foreign visitors may be surprised to learn – and it came as a shock even to the natives – that the Freaky Foot was once a commercial item, seriously offered for sale, in the shape of a foot, made of raspberry ripple with a blackened big toe that was rendered in chocolate.
Instead of shaking our heads over the insanity of this design, and the very slim chances of success it had even the first time round back in the 1980s – let alone the laughably remote likelihood of a successful revival now – our eyes filled with sunny tears at the memory of summers past.
The Freaky Foot was enveloped in our sun-baked nostalgia; our good wishes will probably be enough to carry the Freaky Foot through another rain-lashed summer. Kids turning blue under their swimming towels on some unidentified and wind-blasted beach might well demand a Freaky Foot to make their holiday complete.
In the towns, men in suits might munch a Freaky Foot and think fondly of their younger selves. I’m telling you, HB are marketing geniuses.
And now, you see, it’s all over. For the moment.
Or possibly forever. The sandcastles have fallen and we’re all back in woolly tights. We have to drink indoors. It is deprivation, of a type. No wonder we are known around the world as volatile and spoiling for a fight; the weather has driven us crazy.