I began to experience something approaching hate and it was directed at the weatherman. His jaunty tone suggested that he was bringing me good news, but the true essence of his message was one of unrelenting and sodden gloom. I wondered with great bitterness just what exactly the mad meteorologist had to smile about as he pointed at his satellite image of the real Hidden Ireland - invisible once again as he assured me chirpily that more bad weather was on the way. Never mind, he seemed to be saying - it's a fascinating satellite picture.
I was once informed at school that, from the air, Ireland looked like a sideways dog but, as yet, I have no proof of that. Have you ever seen Ireland from the air? Has anyone ever actually seen it from above? Have we ever seen anything other than alleged satellite pictures of a grey and cloudy nothingness - no peninsulas, no mountain ranges, no Lough Neagh - just great swathes of swirling rainstorms where our supposed isle is rumoured to be. If we weren't so soaking wet we might perhaps begin to question our very existence.
Myself and my travelling companion were in Connemara, holed up in what you might call a bungalow and we were taut, fraught and fit to be tied. My impatient response to the thatch versus slate debate was to suggest putting a roof over the whole country - any kind of roof - perspex, corrugated iron, any damn thing. I had clearly arrived during the rainy season, a class of monsoon, a soft fortnight and a wash-out. There was nothing much on the box either, apart from our man from the Met Service who didn't seem at all disturbed that this was the wettest June since the Jurassic period. Suddenly even the Lagerbelt of Spain seemed alluring.
Earlier in the month I had spent a beautiful Connemara weekend on the Errislannan Peninsula. It was that freak good weather back then that lulled me into a false sense of security and duped me into forgetting about the climatic facts. It had been Mediterranean then and the little sideways dog was panting loudly in the heat. It had been all butterflies, ponies, dragonflies and hares. The days had lasted forever like childhood days and I had decided, yet again, to leave the big city and come to Connemara and grow a beard. I wanted to be Michael Viney. I longed to run with the hare, stroll the lanes of fuchsia, listen to the cuckoo and swim with the seals. Sure, why would anyone ever want to be anywhere else?
And so here I was back in the same but now unrecognisable spot, my battered red car sitting bewildered in the landscape like that NASA go-cart on Mars. I was looking hopelessly for my mountains and my boglands, my trout lakes and my crannogs but there was nothing to be seen in any direction. I relayed a message back to Mission Control - "Come home," they said. "You've tried. You've been brave. The conditions clearly do not exist to support a holiday."
But I know there's things here! I protested, there's a town nearby, I know it, a post office, a shop! There's a mountain range here somewhere, I'm sure of it! Stonechats! Meadow pipits! The Bog Asphodel!
The only sign of life, however, was a hiker in orange waterproofs wading across the distant tundra. Possibly doing penance, I thought, for some horrible deed. When he finally vanished in the mist I feared he might only ever reappear in some Heaneyesque poem a thousand years from now - dug up, preserved, saintly and wringing wet. As the water ran down the back of my neck I motored on though the soup in search of the place I had once been. I consulted Tim Robinson, Ordnance Surveys, heavy sheep just out of the wash, demented cyclists in yellow wellies: not one of them had seen my beloved mountains. Nobody had seen them for days. Not even one Pin. I sat in the car and listened to a tape of the Beach Boys and an imperious goat on a daft erratic clearly thought I was nuts. And of course I was.
And then there was that added acute pain of one's own stupidity. Certainly I should have known better. As a child I used to go to a place in Donegal which shall remain nameless but which in Irish means The Saturated Watery Corner of the Endlessly Wet Place. I always ended up there in July and always it lashed, always it teemed and always we would confine ourselves to B&B or caravan, gazing forlornly out the windows like animals in a zoo where people had long since stopped coming. Sometimes we would force ourselves and step out into the downpour and nip from shop to shop - standing in the doorways and staring at the swelling drains. It was a place with no light and the only real comfort came from the cozy heat of rotating chickens in the window of the local cafe. I stood before those rotating chickens day after day. There was nothing else for it. There was more sport to be had on Lough Derg.
And so, here in Connemara for a fortnight, I realised there would be no chance of moonlit walks, stargazing, badger-watching or conversing with midnight otters. It would be a matter of lighting the fire and praying to Saint Jude. The two of us sitting on our appropriate sides of the hearth like The Tailor And Ansty, telling ghost stories, playing pontoon and looking for faces in the flames. And then we discovered that we would even be deprived the joys of turf-smoke itself. The final blow.
"Sure nobody uses turf round here," says a man in Griffins. "It's too much bother. You can get briquettes in Clifden."
Someone in Roundstone suggested that we simply drive out the road and fill the boot. Swipe it. The thought of us speeding around Connemara like Bonnie and Clyde rustling turf was briefly exciting but in the end we thought better of it. In any case, we'd have to dry it with a blow-torch and run it through a mangle or a pizza oven. And so I bought a few bales of briquettes and grumpily settled down to read about precipitation, erosion and the fauna of waterlogged blanketbog. I suppose it passed the time.
According to Dineen (Donal Dineen) there are 15,056 words for rain in the old tongue. These I repeated mantra-like to myself until my travelling companion could take no more and rashly set off into the deluge. "I may be gone some time," she said.
I haven't seen her since.
Meanwhile, I muttered on alone about rain-checks and rainforests and raincoats. It never rains but it pours. Rainy night in Georgia. Singing in the rain. Raining cats and dogs and saving things for a rainy day - a notional time of particular need in the future. Some holiday, eh? It was like living in An Beal Bocht - the wet bits - and a local fox came to peer through the window at this strange, shivering figure talking to himself before the blazing briquettes.
Of course, I should be well used to it. My home ground of Fermanagh is well and truly saturated - possibly the wettest place in the known world. They say that for half the year the lakes are in Fermanagh and that for the rest of the year Fermanagh is in the lakes. They say that when you see the mountains it's going to rain, when you can't see the mountains it is raining. This constant dampness affects your personality in several ways but most notably it promotes a laid-back attitude which sees little or no sense in making plans for anything. No point in making preparations to go out fishing the next morning when there is every chance that there will be torrential rain, your boat will be sunk and your wellingtons filled in seconds. No point in making arrangements that will more than certainly have to be cancelled.
Back among the invisible Twelve Pins I abandoned all hope of getting close to the land and headed for a hotel with manicured lawns, wet pheasants and fancy cutlery. I kind of enjoyed a few days of living like a lord who wouldn't have wanted to set foot on the bog anyway, other than to shoot grouse or horse-whip an estate worker. And so, eventually, I surrendered and gave up all pretence. For the first time in my life I abandoned a holiday and cut my losses. Myself and my Connemara love decided to part.
Of course I want us to get back together again now. When I think of Connemara today I rarely think of the closed-in cloud and the north-easterly wind. I imagine rather the odd shadow moving across a mountainside. I see ravens and falcons and all the colours of the bog. I am drinking from streams with their crimson droplets of fuchsia and I am once again flat-out on coral beaches and endless strands - just me and a couple of plovers. In the distance, the sun is glittering on the quartzite of the Pins and the lark singing his heart out in the clear air. Isn't it amazing how we can remember things that hardly ever happen? Even things that never happened at all. I write this on St Swithin's Day and it's pouring outside. Rain is general all over Ireland.
John Kelly presents The Eclectic Ballroom on Radio Ireland. His book Cool About The Ankles is published by Blackstaff Press