As Irish fields drown, island terraces in the Canary Islands parched

IN ALMOST every email I’ve received from Ireland, the UK, or Scotland for the last three months, my correspondents mention somewhere that the rain is beating on the windows as they write, writes Damien Enright

Emails are often businesslike, perfunctory, minimalist things, and that the writers should take the time to tap out the weather report speaks for itself. In my mind’s eye, I see them cowering behind the curtains. In my mind’s ear, I can hear the hard drops pelting like buckshot off the glass.

Someone told me that in West Cork ditches were coming adrift and floating stately down sloping fields into the sea. We are, of course, a people given to hyperbole, but I can well see them, uprooted by continuous deluges, moving downhill like islands in the mist, their passage made easier by the slippage factor of beaten-down silage grass providing well-greased gradients where, were one inclined toward winter sports, one could sit on a tea-tray and enjoy tobogganing as one would on snow.