Sun Worship

First published in the Western People on Monday.

Why is the great Irish nation so fascinated with the weather? For this reason: when the sun comes out in Ireland, it isn’t just that it feels like you’re living in another country. It feels like you’re living in the best country in the world.

Being bathed in sunshine isn’t the island’s natural state. Someone has quipped that the difference between summer and winter in Ireland is that in summer, the rain is just that little bit warmer. That’s not far off the mark.

Just as Eskimo languages are said to have many different words for snow, so too the first language of Ireland, Gaeilge, has a variety of different ways of telling us it’s raining, each more horrendous than the next.

So that’s the first thing about the sunshine. When the sun is shining it cannot be raining, and we are therefore already ahead of the game. And then when we look around, we see the real difference that exists.

The grass is that much greener, the sky that much more blue, and the beaches are transformed through the sun’s strange alchemy from a drab grey to a warm golden sheen. Even the sidewalks, buildings and roads of the towns and cities are strangely different – brighter somehow, more open, less claustrophobic. It’s like one of those days at school when you were let bring in your toys.

Look back on old family pictures to see the difference. See how much happier people are in summer, happier even than at Christmas, with all its hidden tensions? It’s very hard pull faces or throw strops when the sun is beating down and the planet is smiling back at it.

Not, of course, that the sun is always your friend. Your correspondent realised that he had crossed that divide between boy and man when my scalp started getting sunburned at Championship matches. A consultation with a hand-held mirror revealed that battle had turned early in the gentleman’s long war between scalp and hairline, and the fall of the hairy kingdom was inevitable.

Now, a hat and an application of sunscreen as heavy as butter on toast is the order of the day if I’m to be abroad under the sun. While a toasted pate stings like the devil, sunburn can lead to other embarrassments. Some years ago, when all the world was young, a friend of the column was at home for the summer, studying for repeat exams at the University, and discovered this the hard way.

After a hard week of looking out the window, our man went into town to refresh himself. He had a skip of beer, staggered home, and feel into bed, content.

The content was quickly replaced by panic and a thunderous headache when the next thing of which he was aware was his mother, roaring at him, shaking him awake, telling him it was Sunday and time for Mass. And if he didn’t get up right this minute, she would get him up, put him in the shower and wash him herself – many’s the time she’d washed him as a child, and did she think she was ashamed of it? No, she was not. And so on, et cetera, ad infinitum.

A splitting head and cramping belly is infinitely preferable to the Irish Mother when she goes full Barack Obama in terms of oratory. Our man got up, showered, dressed, passed on the great big fry for breakfast, and set off walking down the road to the village church, a twenty-minute stroll or so.

After about the twelfth minute of the stroll, Barack-Mammy had faded entirely from memory and all of which that our man was aware was the sun beating down, his head blowing up and general bodily agony. In the distance, the church bell rang, putting another shudder through his nervous system. It was time for an Executive Decision.

He hopped the ditch, lay down in a field and fell into a blessed and blissful sleep, curled up like a baby.

Our man woke with a clear head – the benefit of breathing God’s clear air, rather than the smoky atmosphere of the Irish public houses at the time – and the awareness of a gnawing, all-powerful hunger. Sunday dinner wouldn’t be long dealing with that. He climbed over the ditch again, and hurried home.

Our man walked into the kitchen by the back door and sat down without a care in the world. He was slightly surprised by the absence of a big pot of spuds on the range. He looked around – his younger siblings goggled at him, but were afraid to say anything. They knew there was a storm brewing, and didn’t fancy getting caught in the squall.

“And where were you?” asked Mother.

“I was at Mass,” says our man, oblivious.

“Who said it?” queried Mother, relentless. “What was the sermon about?”

“Father Molloy said it,” replied our man, “and the sermon implored us to love God, and to love our neighbour.” He stressed the second part, to show just how much attention he had been paying. No stranger to the inquisition, our man was confident that this detail would win the day.

Strangely, it was doing anything but. Our man surveyed the field. The younger siblings continued to goggle, while the mother still looked like thunder. What was going on?

“And how long did Father Molloy take to get it through to you that you should love God and love your neighbour?”

“I don’t know, maybe ten minutes. Why?”

“Because,” said his mother, menacingly, “I don’t think you were at Mass at all. I don’t think you even know it’s nearly three o’clock in the day. I think you spent the past three hours passed out from drink ASLEEP IN A FIELD!”

Horror! It was like the woman was psychic – how could she know? Our man swivelled around the kitchen to get his bearings – and suddenly caught sight of himself in a mirror.

He walked over to inspect his reflection. A straight line ran vertically down his face, dividing it neatly between left and right. To the right, he was pale as a pint of milk. The left side of his face, however, was as red as a side of bacon.

And then the mother let a gasp of a laugh, the spell was broken, and they were all falling about laughing after that. In the summertime, no-one stays mad for too long.

Think the Rain is Bad? What Will We Do When the Snow Returns?

Yesterday’s flooding in Dublin gives a nervous Spailpín Fánach pause to wonder about what exact plans have been made for the return of the snow.

We all know it’s coming. The ads for shoe ice grips for shoes have been running on the Irish Times home page for weeks. And it’s reasonable to ask just what the local authorities and the great ship of state herself are doing to get ready for another harsh winter in Ireland.

The first really hard snap in January of last year came out of the clear blue sky. The buses being cancelled in Dublin was annoying, but understandable. Who had ever seen it this bad?

The second time, eleven months later in November, was a little more annoying. When the temperatures dropped below freezing and Dublin Bus cancelled its services, for the “greater safety of the population,” we wondered just why they weren’t more prepared this time, and if it’s really acceptable to have a workforce have to make its own way home when the weather gets bad. They had ten months to think about it, after all.

Which means there are now no excuses for a third time. If the local authorities are doing their jobs, they will have plans made for when the ice hits. Because it’s coming, just as surely as God made little green apples.

They’re prepared across the water. The London Times had a report yesterday detailing the provisions that Her Majesty’s Government have taken for the safety of the citizens of the realm. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr George Osbourne, is carrying out an austerity program in Britain not dissimilar to the one here but even though road maintenance budgets have been cut, the British have still upped their salt budget.

The British, like ourselves, have a number of different agencies in charge of different aspects of transportation, but all the British agencies have already done their bit to keep the show on the road. Network Rail has spent £60 million pounds to keep the railway working, including investing in six snow carriages, decked out with ploughs, scrapers and brushes.

Heathrow has spent £34 million to get ready for the snow, an investment that includes the cost of 185 snow clearing vehicles. Gatwick has spent eight million pounds to buy, amongst other things, fourteen snow ploughs and over half a million litres of anti-icing agents.

The British local authorities have a stockpile of 1.4 million tonnes of salt. The highway agency has another quarter of a million, and there’s a Government National Strategic reserve supply of 450,000 tonnes.

Not only that, but the different local authorities realise they are in a different ballgame and so are deciding to salt less roads and send the trucks out in colder conditions in order to make supplies last longer. London’s Lambeth Council salted at one degree Centigrade last year. This year, the trucks don’t go out until it hits zero. It makes a difference, and the salt lasts longer.

Devon County Council has reduced the roads it will salt from 1,600 to 1,520, a five per cent reduction, to conserve supply. They know that climate change is now here, and they are making adjustments.

An Spailpín Fánach looks forward to the announcement from Minister for Transport, Mr Leo Varadkar, TD, and from Minister for Local Government, Mr Phil Hogan, TD, about what the Government’s plans are to prepare for this year’s harsh weather. Or will they just shrug their shoulders and blame Mr Chopra, like they always do?

Frozen Dublin: Pratfalls and Snowballs

The city of Dublin is frozen tonight, like one great block of ice. An Spailpín had to walk home through it, the buds in Dublin Bus having taken one look out the canteen window, shivered, and returned to their cards. Allegedly.

There’s no way between Hell and Bethlehem they’re gritting that in time for the commute to work tomorrow. The RTÉ news site is reporting that the Corpo owes five gritting trucks. The greater Dublin area covers an area of three hundred and fifty square miles. How fast can a gritting truck go? Do the math and draw your own conclusions.

The best thing the citizens can do tonight is to visit their whiskey shelves and make a few hot ones, congratulating themselves on being at home in the first place. When An Spailpín heard a bud from Dublin Bus or the Corpo or some other class of stonecutter telling Matt Cooper on Today FM that Dublin Bus were going to “make a call” on whether they’d take gritters out tonight and get the public transport system back up, or snuggle up in bed and take a jolly good go at it first thing in the morning, your faithful quillsman realised that his boots were made for walkin’, and set off into the night.

And considered himself lucky to do so. The traffic was making no progress whatsoever. Crossing the streets it was clear that the roads were sheer ice, and haste would be made slowly. Very, very slowly.

But I made it home safely, with only one incident of note. As An Spailpín trudged up Poplar Road towards the crossroads at glamorous Summerhill Parade, I espied some youths of the locality preparing snowballs.

One of them, a rangy welterweight, stepped forward and let fly for a bus (an out of service bus, of course, but recognisably a bus nonetheless). An Spailpín noted that he aimed for the cabin, where the driver sits, and realised aha! These are the disaffected urban poor of whom Joe Higgins, Fintan O’Toole, Vincent Browne and others speak so eloquently.

As Fintan himself might say, the projecting of the snowball was in fact the projection of a greater truth; from this simple action we can draw a metric, if you will, that expresses this young man’s inarticulate yet wonderfully expressive rage at the bus, which he sees, not as nineteen tonnes of Volvo B9TL with Alexander Dennis Enviro500 bodywork, but an expression of the cruel and faceless power structures that imprison him in Summerhill, born to bloom unseen, forgotten about by the heartless metropolis. Take that, says the snowball thrower, as the missile smashes home against driver's window! I’m a man! I rage, I rage, against the driving in the night!

And then the second snowball hit your correspondent on the right cheek, just above the line of An Spailpín's current unusually elaborate whiskers. As I walked on, cheek stinging from the snow, ice and grit, it became clear that the bombardiers were perhaps not disenfranchised urban youth striking with poetic and symbolic beauty against the insignia of the cruel capitalist oppressor, but rather democrats like myself, who view all targets as equal sources of feckless amusement. Sigh.






Technorati Tags: Dublin, Dublin Bus, weather, snow, snowball, traffic

It's Always Stormy Weather....

He never fooled me, you know. I knew, ever since I was a child, that it wasn’t the rain that put Gene Kelly dancing all those years ago. I’d put my own money on Gene's tremendous relief at having finally got shot of Donald O’Connor and his Good Mornin’, Good MORRR-NIN'! all night long as the inspiration behind the splashiest soft-shoe shuffle in the history of cinema. It’s not puddles that Gene Kelly is kicking in the famous sequence – it’s the imagined ginger nut of that knock-off Danny Kaye.

Nothing about rain is ever good. Bertie Wooster, on his countless retreats to the country, used to like to remark that bad weather was “very good for the crops,” but we have the evidence of Wooster’s man, Jeeves, that Wooster is “mentally negligible,” and Wooster’s fatuous opinion on weather simply confirms the man as a bally idiot.

Besides, even if rain is good for the crops, what damned use is that to An Spailpín Fánach, who is neither potato nor barley nor wheat? All the weather has done for your unusually damp diarist is put him in fouler form that usual, snarling at little old ladies under their parasols, and stopping little children in the street to tell them how few days are left in the holidays. That gives me a laugh alright.

Even though people insist to me that Galway is a wetter city than Venice itself, I don’t recall getting soaked there all that often. With one exception. It was October or so in the early nineties, slate grey skies, teaming rain, damp, wet and miserable. I was trudging up from Colláiste na hOllscoile, Gaillimh, to my then residence at Laurel Park, Newcastle. I favoured a big black overcoat at the time, because I thought it made me look like Humphrey Bogart, although in hindsight the reality was the I probably looked more like a Welsh slagheap come to hideous life and making a break for freedom from conscription into a male voice choir, singing Men of Harlech for evermore. The garment was soaked through, and it weighed as heavily on my shoulders as all the woes of the world.

I was shod in Doctor Martens’ boots, the upper of one of which had parted company with the sole, citing irreconcilable differences. The squelch was audible at every footstep.

And to cap it off, I then favoured a soft and luxuriant full face beard, like the late Ciarán Bourke in the original incarnation of The Dubliners, as I was as enthusiastic about appearing old then as I am about appearing young now. The rain sluiced off my caibín, down my plump cheeks, where it agglutinated in the rich undergrowth of my whiskers. Eventually, enough water accumulated to form the biggest and coldest drop of rain in the history of the world, a big and cold drop of rain that would then be impelled by the boundless forces of gravity to fall to the earth. Or, in this case, that precise V where the gentleman’s shirt opens. Every minute or so, inevitably, the biggest and coldest raindrop in the world hit that sweet spot at the crux of the shirtfront with solemn monotony, and from there dribbled down my chest onto the great expense of my belly, taking even more wrong directions than Kris Kristofferson’s Pilgrim on it’s lonely way back home. Nothing you can tell me about rain, hoss.

And despite all that, despite have stood before the mast in that squally city, this sodden summer has your dripping diarist near breaking point. I remember wet summers as a kid, but a shower of hailstones at the Connacht Final ten days ago? That’s just not natural. That fool that wrote the Pina Colada song, who liked getting caught in the rain, was clearly never caught in the rain that often, or else its appeal would quickly have paled with him. An Spailpín Fánach, laid low all week with a dose of the ‘flu, has been caught in the rain now once too often, and he is sick, sick, sick of it. It’s strictly California Dreamin’ with me for the rest of this sorry summer.





Technorati Tags: Ireland, weather, rain, summer