Ours is a temperate climate. So we were told at school. No extremes. Never too hot. Never too cold. The golden mean, as in philosophy. Defined by Aristotle as “the desirable middle between two extremes, one of excess and the other of deficiency.” Socrates too. Confucius, Aquinas, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam all laud the way of sweet moderation.
You would imagine, in this temperate zone, we live in the best of all possible worlds where even the changes between summer and winter are also usually moderate. Hmm! It’s the rain you see (all the time!).
St Swithin's Day was on July 15th last. Glorious, it was. Remember the old rhyme about St Swithin's Day? St Swithun's Day if thou dost rain/ For 40 days it will remain/ St Swithun's Day if thou be fair/ For 40 days 'twill rain nae mare."
Rubbish. Lies, damn lies, and St Swithin’s Day!
Three days after St Swithin’s Day I was down the west and the rain on that Saturday lashed the streets of my hometown from dawn to dusk. We had 40 days’ worth in those hours. Or so it seemed.
The middle of July tends to be when the jet stream settles into a relatively consistent pattern. If it lies north of these islands throughout the summer, continental high pressure is able to move in, bringing warmth and sunshine. If it settles south, Arctic air and Atlantic weather systems are likely to predominate, bringing colder, wetter weather. Hence the St Swithin’s myth.
The Royal Meteorological Office next door has this more accurate – if altogether prosaic – take on the Swithin's rhyme. St Swithin's day if thou dost rain/ For 40 days, relatively unsettled there's a fair chance it will remain/ St Swithin's day if thou be fair/ For 40 days, a northerly jet stream might result in some fairly decent spells/ But then again it might not.
Which proves that the neighbours, generally, tend to sacrifice rhyme to reason.
I loved rain twice. Both times it was in New York. My first arrival there coincided with a terrific thunderstorm. Spiky lightning threatened the skyscrapers and torrents challenged the bus’s windscreen wipers while flowing like rivers on either side. It was six weeks later before I saw rain again. To my astonishment I was overcome with homesickness. Sometimes it’s not easy being Irish.
Temperate, from the Latin temperatus, meaning restrained, moderate, steady.
