Clouds of delusion, when they're not drenching us, convince those of us who never do the Lotto that we are bound to win that €16 million, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
It's either the Lotto or the weather; there isn't really time to think about anything else. The news has kind of faded from view, because all that stuff has happened already. The Lotto and the weather offer endless glimpses of the future. One nation under cloud, one nation under delusion - or both at the same time. It's the weather forecasters we must feel sorry for, as they cower indoors during daylight hours, terrified of public retribution. I mean, we knew things were bad, but we didn't realise that they were so bad that Met Éireann would drag out its old picture of daffodils and use it as a cheerful backdrop for television forecasts in July.
You can't blame them really. It does feel like a chilly, rain-drenched spring and many people welcome daffodils at that time of year. I suppose Met Éireann had difficulty in finding an image which accurately depicted this summer - sponges, even magnified, are not that photogenic. Either our national weather forecasters with their daffodils are trying to fool us all, for our own sakes, into believing it is a chilly, rain-drenched spring or they have cracked under the atmospheric pressure and actually believe themselves that it is spring. In which case their jobs, as well as their lives, may be in danger.
These are testing times. Your trousers get sodden at the hems, and you squelch home with your flares flapping horribly on your shins, which brings many of us straight back to the 1970s. And while you are experiencing this uncomfortable flashback, you are also wondering how many houses you are going to buy with your Lotto win. I mean are you going to be the Sebastian Flyte type of millionaire with luxurious homes, fully staffed, dotted about these islands, or are you going to go the Bill Gates route and hit the philanthropy trail big time? Sure, there's not much good you can do with €16 million these days, so you might as well start buying. And how are you going to keep your new-found wealth a secret? My God, if you buy a new shirt you phone all your friends to share the news.
You're going to have to give up drinking for security reasons.
The thing about those of us who never do the Lotto is that we are convinced that we will win. We have not become inured to failure. We're the idiots who actually sit in front of the Lotto draw with pencils at the ready. We're the ones who have paid €4 for Lotto Plus (I think) so we don't have to embarrass ourselves too much by not being able to select our own numbers, even though our mothers have explained it to us, several times.
We haven't really grasped that other people do the Lotto as well. Within the privacy of our own madness we believe that we're the only ones who think that possessing €16 million might be a good idea. So, in the shopping centre on Wednesday (carefully chosen because there is a higher chance of anonymity there) it came as a big surprise to find a queue at the newsagents. All those people, ruining it for you. And they know how to select their numbers. And they probably know what a rollover is. And they've probably known for years that, in the unlikely event that you don't win millions, you can bring your ticket back to the newsagents to see if you have won a teeny, tiny prize.
Wednesday was a pretty busy day, actually. On Wednesday the RTÉ forecast for tomorrow, Sunday, showed four black clouds, each on an Irish coast. And the thing is that our weather forecasters have only four black clouds. They have never been seen to use any more than four. They're throwing everything they have at this. Four clouds and an old slide of daffodils.
Then there's Francis on Sky.
He's looking terribly thin, he's working terribly hard. Sky has taken to interviewing Francis, without his jacket, in his office, and it just doesn't look right. Francis should always be captured in front of a map, his West Country vowels slipping over the weather fronts and coming to a skidding stop - the television presenter's equivalent of a hand-brake turn.
Now, Francis has no time limits. He explains the definition of torrential rain with two little lines between his eyebrows, and does not send secret messages to his girlfriends as in this remark, made last year: "But no matter how lovely the weather tomorrow, it will not be as lovely as last night, which was really beautiful." Boom, boom! Francis is something of a legend in our house.
I love a weather forecast with a secret message. At the moment the weather forecasts with the secret messages come from TG4. They are in Irish. They are delivered by buxom girls who can obliterate entire mountain ranges just by turning sideways, and are watched faithfully by Dublin men who would have difficulty telling you what sláinte means. Yet these dedicated souls watch the TG4 weather forecasts every day. And when you ask them what was said, they have absolutely no idea.
Perhaps there is no word in Irish for daffodil.
amhourihane@irish-times.ie