Some have been drenched, some are just damp, but everyone has had their own personal experience of this rainswept summer, unless of course, they ran away to a place where the sun shines, writes Fiona McCann
THE LAST FEW DAYS of August are upon us, and summer is officially coming to an end, though most of us are still waiting for it to begin. The figures bear witness: during this year's allegedly sun-drenched season, Dublin Airport recorded some 300.5 millimetres of rainfall in July and August, approximately a third of the expected total for the year. New records were set for the hazy August days, when in one 24-hour period alone more than 76 millimetres fell on the heads of whoever was still left after a sodden July.
It was grey. It was wet. It defied even our substantially lowered expectations. Some stayed and waded through it, some profited from it, and some ran swiftly in the opposite direction, but for the survivors of the summer of 2008, the glass is defiantly half-full, albeit of rainwater.
Farmer Dominic Leonard will admit that the past three months don't exactly harbour his fondest memories. "I wouldn't say it was a positive experience," he says candidly. The wet and sunless summer took its toll on Leonard's Castlewood Farm in Durrow, Co Laois. "It's been worse than any winter," he says. Summer has its place in the agricultural cycle, much of which is predicated on some change in season, so the arrival of a two-month deluge when crops were expected to be bathed in sunshine is less than beneficial for a place such as Castlewood.
"For most farmers, the crops will have suffered in a big way this year, because when it's very wet you get crops lying down and it's very hard to harvest," says Leonard. "Also, from our perspective as an organic farm, we get more weeds coming up when it's very wet, so that's not good."
The effects of such meteorological misery are felt as much by the farmers as by their produce. "It's just nasty, tramping around in the middle of summer in the rain and the mud, because last winter was awful," he says. "We had a really long winter, wet, cold and nasty, and then to get this again in the summer is horrible."
Leonard accepts that getting soaked to the skin on a daily basis is partly a consequence of his personal career choice. "There's nothing you can do," he says stoically. "When you're a farmer you work outside." Yet, having spent years working in a city-based office job, he has no regrets about his change of life, whatever the changing climate has in store. "As a farmer I would still prefer to be doing this than sitting in an office typing away at the computer all day."
While living off the land requires that Leonard endure whatever the Irish weather throws at him, Nik Quaife, director of Zoetrope Arts PR and Communications, has a more flexible professional life that allowed him to spend this summer working in New York's sun-soaked Hudson Valley.
"I ran, produced, programmed and emceed a spiegeltent, not unlike the spiegeltents we've had here in Dublin, as part of an annual festival called Summerscape," he explains. "I spent last summer here, and the lack of Vitamin D by October made me realise that this summer I had to get away to get some sun." As a consequence, Quaife arrived home replenished and raring to go while the rest of us cling on to the vain hope of an elusive sun-sighting before bunking down for the approaching winter.
"I'm ready for autumn," he says. "I've had the sun, and it was great to be away but it's great to be back. I would never choose to live in New York year-round because I love the four seasons of Ireland. I just wish it got the summer right."
Michelle Power wasn't quite so lucky, having taking a gamble on staying in Ireland that may not have paid off quite as she'd hoped. "Because the weather is so bad here during winter, I decided to use my holidays and go away then, and cross my fingers that we'd get a good summer here," she explains. No such luck. "We had one good weekend, the first bank holiday of the summer, when I got burned in a pair of shorts, so I had a line for the rest of the summer, but after that it rained pretty much every day," she recalls.
As a member of a rowing team that required long hours of training on Ireland's swollen rivers, Power also had the full benefit of Ireland's torrential rain. "I think it's one of those things, that you look back and think of all the good memories that you have, but at the time it was pretty miserable," she recalls. "There were six or seven Saturdays in a row, that's seven weeks, where every Saturday morning I got up and it was absolutely lashing."
Despite the summer soaking she received, Power does not regret staying in Ireland. "I'm glad I stuck around. There's always something going on in summer," she says, adding that the long summer days make up, at least in part, for the wet weather.
"What I love about the summer in Ireland is the fact that, even if you're working a full-time job, at half-five you have a whole other day in front of you." Doesn't the relentless rain drive her out of the country, if not her mind? "You know how the saying goes," she says with a smile. "It'd be a grand country if you put a roof on it."
AUSTRIAN THOMAS BUBENDORFER may well agree with the call for some kind of island-wide canopy to stave off the deluges during our so-called summer. "I saw a weather chart the other day, and it was basically sunny all over the place except for England and Ireland," says the Kerry-based marathon runner. "Sometimes I think why on earth did I move here, with all the places I could have gone," he laughs.
Despite the notorious lack of sunshine, however, Bubendorfer relocated from London to Killorglin where he is running daily to keep in shape for this year's Dublin Marathon. "I'm running for two and a half hours about twice a week, so if it's raining, you get a lot of water on top of your head," he admits.
Bubendorfer has refused to let the rain put him off his goal of completing the marathon in three hours. "Sometimes you think, 'Should I really go out?' But if it's raining on marathon day, you can't say you don't fancy going out after training for months," he says.
In fact, rain for a runner is not necessarily a bad thing, as Bubendorfer points out. "I actually prefer rain to blistering heat on the day of the marathon," he says. "The ideal marathon conditions would be cloudy, but if I had the choice between rain and blistering heat, I'd choose the rain, just for running." He pauses, perhaps reminded of how such calls for rain would be viewed by a population already knee-deep in it, among them his Irish wife, Niamh. "My wife would probably strangle me if she heard me say that."
She would no doubt make even shorter shrift of Patrick Dunne, marketing manager of screenclick.com, an online DVD rental company. "We like bad weather," says Dunne. "Bad weather is great!" This may be down to the fact that the wet weather encourages indoor activities, including nights cuddled under a duvet in front of a DVD - even better when the entire experience can be provided without necessitating a wet run to the rental store to begin with. "You don't have to leave the house," explains Dunne of the screenclick.com system. "[The DVD] gets delivered to your door."
Despite the fact that most of their customers are probably feeling slightly more resentful of a summer spent indoors, Dunne is adamant that there are benefits to a year-round winter season, at least for those who can reap its financial rewards. "We benefited and are looking forward to more bad weather," he says.
Another man who had a good summer this year, despite assumptions to the contrary, was Gerry Collins, owner of the Great Outdoors sports clothing and equipment shop in Dublin. "We obviously didn't do too well in some areas," he admits, citing surfing clothes and T-shirts as the obvious casualties of a wet Irish summer.
"On the plus side, the person who might have bought a pair of flip-flops and a T-shirt now bought a rain jacket instead, which is about three times the value."
It also helps when you carry an item specifically designed to protect against the one element we had a surplus of this summer - water. "We sold loads of kids' wetsuits this year," says Collins. "Even if the weather is pretty poor, if you stick the kids in a wetsuit, they'll still have hours of fun in and out of the water."
While it might seem that camping would not be a top priority given the inclement conditions, Great Outdoors has been cashing in on diehard festival goers. "I can assure you that a lot of people coming in to buy tents are a lot more discerning because of the weather than they would normally be," says Collins. "Normally, it's the biggest tents for the cheapest price, so you pack all your friends in for fun, but being rained on and getting wet is not fun, so people have learned."
Others may argue that the Irish will never learn, as Michelle Power readily admits. Having spent a washed-out weekend at last year's Oxegen festival knee-deep in muck, she's off to the Electric Picnic today in the hope that this year will somehow be different.
"You go back year after year," she says gamely, personifying the indefatigable optimism of a people in constant search of a silver lining. "You're always optimistic that next year, or next month, will be better."