Warm weather has arrived, which is what we have been giving out about since sometime last October.
For months, we looked out at rain, wind, grey skies and the usual Donegal-style sideways drizzle and wondered if summer had been called off. We said things like, “There’s no heat in that sun,” even when there was no sun. We complained that we never get a proper summer anymore.
Then summer arrived.
And we immediately started complaining about that as well.
Within two days, people who had been praying for sunshine were standing in kitchens with the back door open saying, “This heat is desperate.” Men were wandering around in shorts that hadn’t seen daylight since Lanzarote in 2018. Dogs were lying flat out on tiles, looking as if they had given up on life. Even the grass seemed to be saying, “I wasn’t built for this.”
Then came the warnings.
The weather service issued alerts in colours that made it sound as if the sun had escaped from a laboratory. The health service followed with advice that had the tone of a government broadcast during an invasion.
Close your windows.
Stay indoors.
Avoid the sun.
Drink plenty of water.
Spray yourself with water.
Wear factor 50.
Do not exert yourself.
Keep an eye on the elderly, the young, the vulnerable, the pets, the neighbours, and anyone foolish enough to cut the grass.
It was summer, but with homework.
The odd thing was that this advice came at the same time as we were being told to conserve water. So, on the one hand, drink water as if you are crossing the Sahara. On the other hand, don’t waste a drop. Spray yourself, but not too enthusiastically. Cool down, but responsibly. Hydrate, but with civic discipline.
Only in Ireland could a heatwave come with both a health warning and a guilt trip.
The real problem is that Irish houses are not designed for heat. They are designed for January, Atlantic gales and the possibility of damp creeping into your bones. They are brilliant at keeping heat in, which is great when it is five degrees outside and raining. It is less useful when the sitting room has turned into a bread oven and the only cool place in the house is beside the freezer.
By the afternoon, the car is unbearable, the bedroom is worse, and the attic is somewhere NASA could test equipment for Mars.
And yet, every year, around 200,000 Irish people head off to Greece for exactly this sort of weather. Thirty degrees plus. Not a cloud in the sky. Sun bouncing off white walls. Heat rising from the pavement.
We pay good money for it.
In Greece, we step off the plane into a wall of heat and say, “Ah, lovely.” We sit beside a pool, slowly turning pink, and call it paradise. We walk around ruins at midday with a bottle of warm water and tell everyone back home it is fabulous.
But let the same temperature land in Ballybofey, Ballina or Lucan and suddenly it is a national emergency.
Thirty-two degrees in Greece is “glorious.”
Twenty-five degrees in Ireland is “not natural.”
Of course, Greece knows what it is doing. It has shutters, tiled floors, air conditioning, swimming pools, and a sensible tradition of doing very little when the sun is at its worst.
Ireland has carpets, duvets, conservatories, hot presses, and people who still think opening every window in the house is a scientific cooling system.
After three days, the novelty wears off. The lawns go yellow. The milk turns warm between the shop and the car. Children demand ice creams like they are part of their human rights. Adults start saying, “We could do with a drop of rain,” which is a dangerous thing to say in Ireland because the weather might hear you.
Then, eventually, the clouds come back. A bit of drizzle appears. The temperature drops.
And immediately someone says, “That’s the summer over.”
We are impossible.
Give us rain and we want sun. Give us sun and we want shade. Give us shade and we say there’s a chill in it. We don’t really want weather. We want something to talk about.
Still, for a few days, we got the summer we had been asking for.
