The Royal Dublin Society is a serious, respected forum for those with a common interest in science, industry, agriculture and the arts. Its members come together to further their knowledge of their own subject, and to enrich it by means of synergetic interaction with those of other disciplines.
The society was established more than 250 years ago, and has a large membership drawn from all walks of life.
Throughout the winter the RDS organises lunchtime lectures on a wide variety of interesting subjects.
Most of these talks are very good; they are usually given by well-known experts on a given topic, who either give an account of work in which they happen to be professionally involved, or on some aspect of a subject in which they have a special expertise or interest. But occasionally, alas, the RDS has been known to let its standards slip.
Tomorrow, is a case in point; at 1.10 p.m. they have arranged a talk on "Meteorological Serendipity".
Serendipity came all the way from Sri Lanka, which long before it was Ceylon was called Serendip.
It seems the 18th century English essayist Horace Walpole came across and old fairytale entitled The Three Princes of Serendip , the eponymous heroes of which "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". It was he who coined the word "serendipity" to denote the faculty of making lucky and unexpected finds by accident.
Tomorrow's speaker has been accident prone in this fashion for many years. Obliged to spend countless solitary but happy hours sifting magpie-like through the waste paper bins of meteorology, the refuse tips of English literature and the sewers of Irish and European folklore, he has unearthed many an interesting fact and wishful fancy.
None of these useless bits of information is original, and all of them have been shared over the years with the select readership of this very column, but some of them may be mildly amusing or diverting for all that.
Why, for example, did Benvenuto Cellini fire a cannon from a roof in medieval Rome? What was Robespierre's connection with the weather?
And do you know why, meteorologically speaking, it is the custom to eat goose in autumn?
This is the stuff of tomorrow's lecture in the RDS - a gossip column of footnotes to the history of meteorology, intended to stir up rousing waves of deepest apathy in an audience who may now and then be heard to murmur "Fancy that!"
And lest, despite the hints, I leave you wondering, the name of the proposed purveyor of these serendipitous trivia can be found at the top this very page.