our climate is heavenly – The Irish Times

Shhh! Shhh! Don’t tell anyone. This is between us. We indomitable Irish need to stop complaining about the weather. OK, some of us should be told to stop breathing. That’s true. In all my 21 long years… OK, 29 years… Well, and a couple of decades to boot… Maybe more than a couple, but stop arguing! I’ll take that one more time.

In all my many long years on this earth, I cannot remember a time when the Irish – yes, myself included – did not complain about the weather. And that is understandable considering that we inhabit this small island, facing west and stretching across more than 3,000 miles of the wide Atlantic Ocean.

I mean, even the weather apps are often wrong. So our weather is unpredictable and the only certainty is uncertainty.

But even the worst rainy day in Ireland is preferable to what is now becoming the summer norm in much of Europe every year: temperatures of just over 4 degrees in June, July and August, especially in the Mediterranean countries.

It’s similar in the USA, only the humidity is higher. I remember the student summers in New York in July and August as a sweaty hell, day and night. One year we had no air conditioning and couldn’t sleep at night. We had this huge fan for the night. It made so much noise that we couldn’t sleep then either!

If this heat is already hell, the torture is made even worse by the added humidity.

I recently realised what a gift our climate actually is when a friend explained how much her two Italian guests simply loved the “miserable” Irish summer weather. For them, life in their part of Italy has become unbearable in the summer.

In such places, I would simply evaporate. All 60 percent of my body’s average water content (80 percent after a particularly good night’s sleep) would vanish in an instant cloud of steam, leaving behind a sack of rattling bones.

But why the secrecy, the ‘don’t tell anyone’, you might ask? We don’t want Ireland to become another Venice, Barcelona or Dubrovnik, do we? Overrun every summer by tourists looking for ‘cool’?

heatfrom Old English hætu, hæto, meaning “the quality of being hot”.

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