Colm O'Regan: The weather is my fault — I put away the Big Coat

If you’re wondering where the really nice weather went, I may have something to do with it. I put away the Big Coat. Into the attic. A direct two fingers to the gods

Fri, 18 Apr, 2025 - 01:00

Colm O'Regan

Columnist with the Irish Examiner.

If you’re wondering where the really nice weather went, I may have something to do with it. I put away the Big Coat. Into the attic. A direct two fingers to the gods. And if that wasn’t enough, I wore sandals. Yes, me with my hobbit-like toes. That was another “Come At Me Bro” of hubris to the Fates.

Statistically, it had to happen, anyway. And if we didn’t get rain soon, someone would have ended up burning every mountain top on the island.

I loved the weather, but it’s a relief to get back to more Spring-like conditions. I was tired of arguing with children about coats. Because the weather made an absolute eejit of me every day.

Just to recap -and they should have been wearing a cap as well- this time of year, it’s cold in the morning and warm in the day. Children don’t feel the cold. They have the metabolism of waste to heat incinerators. They’d generate body heat out of plastic if you fed it to them. And they’ll go out in the morning wearing swimming togs if you’d let them.

I don’t let them only for two reasons. One, I feel the cold. My 1970s single-pane glass, bed-sit, drafty, lumpy mattress body is simultaneously well-padded and also poor in insulation, and the boiler is going to go any day now. So I don’t believe they don’t feel the cold.

I know we’re supposed to listen to our children and actually hear what they're saying, but they need to stop saying that and wear a coat.

The other problem is that I’m still convinced that being cold automatically leads to getting a cold. No amount of history about the work of Antonie van Leeeuwanhoek (bacteria 1683) and Dmitry Ivanovsky (viruses 1892) and all the work since will convince me entirely that colds and coughs aren’t caused by being cold.

I mean, you are more likely to get a cold in cold weather because pathogens do better and cold air affects your mucus membranes and immune systems but that’s not why I believe what I believe.

I just believe you get a cold in the cold. Colds travel from the cold wall you sat on up through your arse and give you a cold in the kidney.

How do I know this? Because I’m the one who’ll be looking after you when you get a cold.

You don’t need a masters in Platonic dialogue and Greek logic to realise that that is not an answer to the question asked.

But when you’re ten minutes into an argument about a coat as you’re heading out the door in the morning, no one’s covering themselves in Greek oratory glory.

And this time of year, your credibility is shot. They meet you after school reproachfully.

“I was LITERALLY boiling today, Daddy, with the coat you made me wear.”

“Stop saying literally.” That’s all I have.

Nobody likes being proved wrong. It's the hardest thing to come to terms with when the hill you died on was the molehill you made a mountain out of.

And it’s not as if I wanted to wear a coat. At least these children’s coats are nice. The ones I wore were not. Well, they were. I’d wear them now and BE GLAD OF IT, but I couldn’t then. Not that snorkel that looked like one of the lads in South Park that’s always being killed.

The other one was the handmedown. I don’t know which brother it came from. They’d all wiped the memory of it from their minds.

So I, for one, and for one reason, am happy that the weather has become a bit more average. It’s cold now, and it’ll be cool later. Put on that coat. The cold is watching you. Waiting to strike.