And so it’s Autumn. Can summer be far behind? There’s a joke. But who is laughing? How many years has it been now? Let me think.....hmmm ... I’m thinking ... hmmm. I can’t remember when we last had a decent summer. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older. Regardless, summer – where I’m concerned – is a now a concept rather than an experience.
Now I know it’s summer by listening to the radio. In summertime you have the Oliver Callan Show presented by Maura Derrane; the Claire Byrne Show presented by Philip Boucher Hayes; the Ray Darcy Show presented by Katherine Thomas, and Joe Duffy’s Liveline presented by Katie Hannon and whoever you’d like yourself.
Overseas visitors must be mightily confused by this. Why name a programme after one personality but have it presented by another? To which the answer is as simple as it is clear – “it’s summer!”
Visitors probably put it down as yet another Irish eccentricity. Like drinking pints in the rain because it’s July, or insisting “it’s a soft day” when blinded by mist, or going “bye, bye, bye, bye, etc” at the end of every phone call when once is never enough. (Then, isn’t there something artistic about the random pattern marked on creamy pints by rain?)
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It is true that our rain is (generally) warmer in June, July and August and that the days remain longer, but this may be because of saturation due to water rather than “expansion due to heat”, as the Kerryman put it when explaining why days are longer in summer than winter. Clearly, that unique Kerry law of physics applied when there were summers of a more traditional kind.
In theory this is the second day of Autumn, but in a context where Ireland is emerging as a country of just two seasons – of cold rain and warm rain – that no longer applies. The great disappointment is that we were forecast a Mediterranean climate due to global warming. Another false promise. Who can you believe any more?
The solution is to cover the entire island in a dome-like structure within which we can control temperatures, with planned rainfall at particular times for growth. Something like the air dome at Bekan near Knock in Mayo. Another miracle, but on a grander scale. Then we can order in the traditional four seasons.
Autumn, from Latin autumnus.
