THE Met Eireann radio advertisement features an American accent. Of course. Trying to be American is what being European means these days, no matter how ridiculous it must seem to Americans. Guinness has not yet gone stars-and-stripesy on us, but Carlsberg, the pride of Denmark, now passes itself off as an American beer. It is rather like watching a turtle trying to fly.
Just as one is tempted to pat the little reptile's scaly head, and, grabbing it by the claw, lead it down to cool waters, one yearns to point the Carlsberg advertising manager in the direction of Copenhagen and declare: There is your identity; why should we not relish the thought of Danish beer, with Danish foods and clean Danish seas chock-full of long-limbed, flaxen-haired, white-teethed Danes? Only the most crippling cultural cringe could have caused Danes to pass off their beers as American. Maybe their next step will be to rename Lego (which comes from Danish, meaning "play good") Plago. And possibly the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen harbour could be denudified - for American feminists strenuously dislike female nudity - and rechristened the dimensionally challenged mervirginalperson.
Nothing like a Dane
Not that we should blame the Danes - they are only doing what much of Europe is doing. It just does seem such a shame that a delightful people - they like a drink and a laugh and are as easy-going about sex as we are about potatoes - should want to be seen as Americans.
At least, they don't yet talk American English, which is what the Norwegians do. Not that I know the Norwegians. I don't. I know that when not talking American English t they barely talk at all, and go for long brooding walks in their mountains avoiding each other all summer so that they can brood all the more broodily.
Actually, I don't think I've ever met a Norwegian, and I'm not sure what I'd talk about if I did. Heavy water, probably. They have lots of heavy water in Norway. Heavy water is the stuff they make atom-bombs out of. No, I don't know how. Nor, apparently, do the Norwegians. Just as well. Perhaps we should all be grateful that a brooding, Norwegian finger is not poised broodingly upon the trigger, tempted to press it because its owner has been forced to say hello to strangers twice this month already.
I can't complain about Norwegian beer being passed off as an American beer, because I am unacquainted with a Norwegian beer. Perhaps they content themselves by drinking loads of heavy water and indulging in a little fusion before a deep Nordic slumber descends. And anyway I'm not sure what the Norwegians export, apart from oil, and I don't think you can Americanise that. We don't get a cultural cringe about American marine-fossils being superior to Arabic ones, possibly because fossils predate the US by a decade or two, and they are certainly not the consequence of the Jeffersonian experiment.
American weather
Which apparently is more than you can say about the Irish weather, which, to judge by the accent used to promote the Met Eireann weather forecasts, is distinctly American. You know, that wouldn't be so bad if Met Eireann, in addition to selling its services with a truly excruciatingly bad American accent, managed to give us American weather as well. American weather at this time of year might be a little trying, with the occasional smell of burning cities and the the pathetic dying whinny of a Miami tourist who has taken a wrong turning, but it is better than Ireland's.
American weather means that in most places throughout the summer you are spared weather-conversations because the weather is the same as yesterday and tomorrow. The Americans invented the cultural concept of summer as we understand it. Mediterranean peoples detest and fear the summer. Northern Europeans have merely a fleeting and uncertain acquaintance with it, like the girl you met at a bus-stop when you were 16 and have never forgotten.
But for Americans, particularly ones who live beside the sea (or ocean), the summer is the reason to be American. Summer camp. Hot dogs. French fries. Teenage girls in bikinis. Colas. Iced beers.
These images of the American summer torment us nearly as much as do the images of the American Christmas - Jimmy Stewart scrambling through the snow with his arms laden with Christmas presents and sleighbells ringing out over a hundred illuminated Christmas trees in a hundred gardens, oops, yards.
Furs on the beach
But Met Eireann doesn't give us hot summers. It doesn't give us white Christmases. It doesn't give us those spectacular New England autumns (known as falls in Met Eireannese). It feeds us a diet of grey rain and water leaking through our shoes and oddly muggy Christmas days, with two-and-a-half hours of snow every second January which has melted by noon. It gives us a mono-dimensional maritime climate in which visits to the beach in high summer are done in furs, and in which a white Christmas is caused by heavy fog.
Which is fine. Met Eireann can't be blamed for the weather. But it can be blamed for dressing our summer up in the preposterous livery of Americana. It's not just preposterous. It's embarrassing. It's like hearing Jane Fonda putting on an Irish accent or watching American footballers trying to play hurling or listening to John Major sing Follow Me Up To Carlow. An Irish summer is what we've got. Americanising it doesn't improve it a bit. It's still like water coming out of a pipe. And a hose by any other name. . .