My best friend watches the sun like a hawk. Every spring she tracks it as it creeps around her side garden wall. She reports on its progress as it inches towards the far end of her clothesline and when it hits a certain spot she announces, like a 40-something Dublin 7 groundhog, that summer is on its way.
She, like so many Irish people, lives for a sunny day. Particularly a sunny day with any bit of heat in it. It draws us out of our winter cauls, our faces and bellies turning towards its rays like cats. Green spaces become hotly contested real estate, with that one outdoor blanket that everyone has – you know the one, with the twigs and hay stuck to the Velcro bit – marking the territory. Any pub with an outdoor area facing in a favourable direction is mobbed. Women wearing tights curse the earlier, chillier morning versions of themselves. Somewhere, at 11am, a man sheds his top.
On a sunny day everyone is het up. There’s a run on bread rolls and six-packs of Corona. The neighbour with the big happy head is out clanging and foostering in the garden, brushing the cobwebs off the patio chairs and, God forgive me, revving up the power washer. People get giddy. They post deranged Instagram photos of the sky with a bit of their thumb covering the lens, such is their haste to declare that they are out amongst it. Bags are clinking. Children are frolicking. Parents are clutching their left arms wondering if the 2025 prices of Cornettos and Mars Ice-Creams are enough to bring on a heart attack.
I have to say, I don’t always love it. There’s a significant number of lovely days where this fetishisation of a bit of sun causes me to retreat, to resent. It’s just the expectation that you should be making the most of it. The assumption that everyone wants to be out clinking and striding and laughing and doing. There’s an achievement pressure that makes staying indoors feel like a human failing. I find myself suffering a from a kind of demand avoidance where I want to resist doing what is expected.
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Is it clinical, I wonder? Of course, there is low mood associated with the darker and colder months and at worst it manifests as SAD, seasonal affective disorder. There is also SAD associated with the “better” seasons, called summer-pattern SAD or “reverse SAD”. All sorts of factors are thought to contribute to SAD from circadian rhythm disruptions to serotonin and melatonin levels.
Certainly, feeling low or depressed is not going to make one jump with joy at the idea of being outside and with others, even though being social and in the sun probably is the best medicine. Personally, I struggle with the desire to achieve the “perfect” day to accompany the weather, and if I can’t do that then what’s the point? I can convince myself that everyone else is achieving their perfect sunny day activity and it turns me into a kind of Phantom of the Opera except I’m closing the curtains and rotting on the couch rather than skulking around singing and dropping chandeliers.
For me, sunny days are only truly capitalised on if I can be in the sea or a swimming pool. Last summer I made the two-hour round-trip trek to the beach in Portmarnock on almost every fair day. Make hay, and all that. I can also appreciate that being outdoors and being in nature is medicine for the brain, even if the brain is telling you to shun it all.
Sunny and warm days are such a relative rarity in Ireland that it is the hoo-ha around them that can trigger this contrary malaise. In February we had headlines about a record-equalling 11 days of zero sunshine in Dublin. On the rare occasion that we have temperatures higher than Lisbon or Benalmadena it’s a source of national pride.
[ Why has much of Ireland had no sun for 10 days now? The jet stream is to blameOpens in new window ]
We are weather obsessed, which is fair given the unpredictable nature of our climate. It can just all be a bit… much. The weather will weather, no matter how much we wish and talk and plan.
Now, give me a state of emergency and I’m thriving. A Beast from the East? I’m glued to Carlow Weather. I have News Now up on the telly and 20 candles at the ready. Truly, I think I am just a Chilly Willy at heart, rather than a Wibbly Wobbly Wonder.
[ Emer McLysaght: I get sick delight from seagulls robbing chips from crying kidsOpens in new window ]
