You would think that with all the mess we’re in at the moment, the very least we could get would be a reprieve from the elements. What with us still recovering from the trauma of that few inches of snow last week, but alas, it seems that just as you read these words on this frosty Thursday morning, the first flakes of snow are winding their way down from the heavens above you.
And so we slip headlong into another bout of exceptional unprecedented weather, with ducks frowning and fields flooding.
Why can’t we just have boring weather anymore. What we wouldn’t give now for a soft day that throws a coat of fine mist onto your face. There was once a time when our weather wasjust rain. It was boring, predictable, miserable but at least it didn’t kill ya. You never had people breaking their arses on a bit of rain or a windy day. You never had schools closing or casualties full because of rain.
I blame the Celtic Tiger. And the media. During that period, we wanted to have everything that other countries had. We had skiing holidays. Yes, skiing. Gobdaws from Mayo and Leitrim and Laois off skiing. Sure that’s not us. We had to have houses in the sun. Chalets. Convertible cars. European drugs. It was a case of Berlin not Boston. We were no longer content to be the five-eighths on the edge of Europe.
Basically if Heinrich and Dagmar had it, we wanted it. And the more the merrier. No, Ireland wasn’t going to be left behind the others just because we were a rock in the middle of the Atlantic. At the time, our greatest product was rain, we made loads of it and exported a great deal too. We even brought buyers in the form of tourists in to see it falling. Soft Irish dew, me arse. Of course we wouldn’t be satisifed until we got exceptional weather like the rest of Europe. We thought global warming would speed things up. We wanted hotter summers, but that brought colder winters. What, we were even getting to see things like meteor showers and eclipses of the moon, the sort of things you normally never saw with the naked eye, unless you were actually naked and on an island in the Indian Ocean. The bloody meteorites are here all the time now and we don’t take any heed of them.
But as Garth Brooks, the poet laureate of country’n’shite music once said in one of the memorable works ‘ be thankful for unaswered prayers” or something like that because you might end up getting something you don’t want. And so it has turned out. We have European weather and we are where we are. All the money is gone so we can’t go sking in the gardens. Be thankful we don’t have the pot to piss in, cos it’d be frozen before ya get a chance to empty it.
At last we are getting European weather like the Europeans, except they have snowploughs and diggers for getting them out of their homes. All of ours have been repossessed by NAMA.
So we have to grin and bear it. Even the advice we get for cold weather is like something the teacher told us at school. Walk smart and take your hands out of your pockets. Be careful out there, look in on your elderly neighbours, and don’t slip. Remember, a broken hip is not just for Christmas.
