IN Ireland one should avoid topics such as politics and religion: it is much safer to confine oneself to the weather and the crops. Sage advice for visitors, this, and the further north one goes, the sager it gets. Trouble is, with only about 70,000 farmers left, and many of them dealing with bovine quadrupeds (don't mention the Beef Tribunal) the crops aren't a runner any more. That leaves us with the weather, and what a dreary topic that is, isn't it? Agreed. Next business.
Ask any professional hack or scribe about the way even the most bubbling of topics grows into a millstone when lodged as the matter for a regular column. Ask ye noble hack, then, if anyone would consider writing a regular piece about the weather, and wait for hollow laughter.
Then mention that somebody actually does a column, in fact, a daily screed, upon matters meteorological, and you will hear naught but disbelief. Not even the Ancient Mariner signed up for an albatross like that (and the said mariner knew a fair bit about a bad wind).
But here is the living, printed proof that since August 9th, 1988, Brendan McWilliams has been a superb Ancient Mariner, and marinader, trawling forgotten seas of lore and culture, smoothing the ridge on many a high-pressured brow and lifting depression on a Monday morning. Great wreaths and hanging gardens he gives us cultivated on slopes which we deemed arid.
The marinade is a wonderful mixture: the Old Testament and the Crossing of the Red Sea; Homer's Odyssey and classical mythology, all the way through twenty-two topics neatly grouped in a chronological order, and the tone enhanced with elegant line-drawings.
Perhaps the work were better titled A Literate Eye on the Weather, but there is no need for post modern deconstruction of this cultured writing. Certainly in Ireland we have our sayings, like the one about the lazy wind that would sooner go through you than round you. The Irish language isn't neglected, either, but it is the section on mythology which proves how much more forceful it is to say that Boreas is in a bad mood today, than to refer to hectopascals and cyclones.
Oh, the delight of a book which says something simply, with charm and wit, rescuing the hapless from a slow drowning in Euro-babble when worth of wit is measured, in avoirdupois (a worse fate than any of the shipwrecks the author treats of). Yes, there is the sly salesmanship of someone who presumes we are all versed in Classics and Literature, and, sure, it's true we are. Hands up, now, haven't we all read Lorna Doone (and was Blackmore coined the first-name "Lorna") and how she escaped from them nasty Doones, during the Little Ice Age? And we all know how Francis Bacon died from illness caught when stuffing a goose with snow to prove the efficacy of refrigeration in preserving food.
Or how about Richard McGwire, knighted for flying in a balloon off Howth because the owner was loo heavy? And Brendan is the first I know to deal with something I've long suspected: in the days of the dinosaurs, there was more CO2 in the atmosphere, and it was a lot soupier. This must have helped dinosaurs to move, since the thicker air would help their buoyancy. How can we find out from the fossil record what the barometer was reading when the pterodactyls were taking off near Howth? Brendan will know.
The whole production is high standard. There is a fine index, essential in a syntagma like this where a casually received fact will leave a sufferer cudgelling brains for days in the hope of retrieving it in the small hours and the wanting of an index. A wonderful book, this, for a guest-room, though you'd want to trust the visitors or else you'll have little hope of seeing it again. Look, it even has a ribbon hook-marker, just like a prayer book. Totally apt in this godless age, when the nearest ritual we have to nightly Compline is the shipping forecast. Viking, Forties, Cromarty, pray for us; Shannon, Rockall ... "Mammy, who is Lewis? He keeps on saying the Butt of Lewis?"
A newspaper is the sum of its little parts. It derives its character more from its cartoons and crosswords, its little columns, and framing farragos, than from scoops and sensation. What a character witness for The Irish Times is Brendan McWilliams. Long may he reign. The weather as a topic in Ireland can, paradoxically, often be very dry, but here information is set in the context of a culture, our culture, with all the studied equipoise of a minuet in crinoline and powdered wig. (The wig, of course, is shower-proof.)