“If we had a rainy season, we’d have less to torment ourselves with”

THE RAIN, it rains on the just and the unjust. And has been doing so forever. Complaining about the weather in Ireland is like Mrs Lincoln complaining about the play.

It’s a useless critique, and quite beside the point of it.

Ireland is a place of profound wetness, a country so saturated it’s a wonder our babies aren’t coming out with gills on. It’s no good moaning, you just have to get your plastic anorak for a fiver and go about your business.

But as yet another sodden August pours out over us, it’s worth considering a change in terminology. What if we just stopped calling it ‘Summer’ and started referring to the months from May to August as ‘the rainy season’ instead?

Like they do in the Tropics? It could be useful, if only in terms of managing expectations. Summer gives everyone too much to hope for, with its connotations of sunshine and dryness.

If we had a rainy season, we’d have less to torment ourselves with. Plus, there’d be the psychological advantage of being prepared for the on-rushing deluge.

It’s a term soaked in romance that accurately describes that period when we all go camping in order to get soaked to the bone every year. And rainy seasons elsewhere have historically proven to be inspirational to writers, poets and similar. Why should we not cash in on the mystique they offer?

Think of how many classic Graham Green novels might have been set in Garrettstown or Bundoran, rather than Vietnam or West Africa, had we cottoned onto the term sooner.

But we couldn’t have done that of course, because bad summers are a new invention in Ireland. It was never this wet in the ’50s, according to my father.

Back then, the sun scorched the stones of Cork city, from early morning until 10 at night, and everyone went about their business, catching tadpoles in plastic bags in the river, and working in the Sunbeam factory under a blazing radiance.

That’s how he recalls it anyway. Granted my dad also remembers the ’50s as a time of unparalleled joy and freedom, so I suspect he’s not the most reliable chronicler of the era.

All the same, he went to school in the inner city where the kids were uniformly leathered by their teachers, so he can be forgiven for remembering the blessed days of summer holidays as eternally golden.

But even if I can’t believe his evidence about the decline of our summers, it doesn’t matter. I have my own proof of it. When I was 15, I went to Irish college for the first time, on the Dingle peninsula. All I remember is a month of blue skies in Ventry.

Blue skies and sunshine, and going to céilís, and trying to flirt as gaeilge with exotic boys from Dublin. Good times. Ní raibh scamall sa spéir, truly. I am sure it rained once or twice while we were there.

In fact, being as how it was Kerry in July, I am sure it rained the whole time we were there, but I just can’t remember it. All I remember is learning how to say ‘will you go out with my friend’ in Irish, and hearing The Smashing Pumpkins ‘Today’ played on the guitar by a gorgeous boy from Clonskeagh.

The rain rolls off you when you’re having that sort of a summer.

Maybe that’s how it was for my dad as well?

Maybe all the memories of slogging apples, or whatever he got up to, has erased the chill of the rain and the wind that was surely as much a part of summers in the ’50s as it is of our summers now?

Or maybe it’s just climate change in action? Science says it’s the latter, but it’s also true that you don’t notice bad weather when you’re young, and happy and the endless days are running into one another, and school is a distant prospect in September. Just as in the same way a long wet summer is a kick in the teeth when you’re all grown up and you have work to go to, I am sure we got soaked in Ventry that summer, in fact I know we did.

I remember a bus trip to Slea Head where the rain lashed the windows so hard we could have been driving around in the back garden for all we knew. But we didn’t care, we were drawing hearts on each other’s copybooks, and kissing in the back of the bus.

When I think of that summer, it’s not the rain I remember, it’s The Smashing Pumpkins, and the boys from Dublin. I hope that’s how it is for everyone.

Whatever we end up calling it, summer will always be more than just the weather.

Aida Austin is on leave