Perhaps the worst thing about the Irish summer is the Sun Police's injunction that it must be spent outdoors, writes Donald Clarke
PRECISELY 20 tears ago, like many people of my generation, I decided to summer in New York. Knowing that I am easily (hem, hem) hot and bothered, a great many of my friends made it their business to predict total psychological meltdown. Any person so physically and emotionally unsuited to hot, humid weather would, upon exposure to the malfunctioning sauna that is Manhattan in July, surely go stark raving crazy. Some time before Labour Day arrived, I would be found lecturing the squirrels in Central Park about various looming apocalypses.
My experience was rather different. Painfully aware of the bizarre fact that the eccentrics who founded America's largest city elected to do so in a locale that feels like Rangoon in summer and Vladivostok in winter, the good people of the five boroughs rarely venture outside during those seasons. When, during August, somebody from New York City says that the weather is horrible, they mean that it is baking hot and that the specific humidity is similar to that in SpongeBob SquarePants's living room. Accordingly, they head rapidly (well, under the circumstances, not that rapidly) for the nearest building with functioning air conditioning. It is no accident that American cinemas do their best business in summer.
Things are very different here. We will insist upon going outside in summer. Even as the rain vomited down day after day throughout this year's biblically damp July, you would still see optimistic alfresco diners watching sadly as their bruschetta floated off in the latest mighty cascade. An ancient doctrine of the Irish summer still holds true today: if you can go outside then you will go outside.
In marked contrast to the American attitude, Irish parents have generally regarded visiting the cinema in the summer months as an act of sinful perversity. "You're going to the pictures on a nice day like this?" they would tell the youthful me. Well, what else would I do? Go surfing? Start laying out that ornamental rockery? Develop an interest in birdwatching? It hardly seemed fair that the slightest flicker of sunlight led to a moratorium being imposed on all one's favourite indoor activities. At least the cinema was at some safe distance from the disapproving glare and shrill commands of the Sun Police.
Try watching television during those few seconds of August light and you would be made to feel like Hugh Hefner at an Amish wedding. Minutes later, unable to resist the barked entreaties, you would find yourself standing miserably in the back garden wondering how The Hair Bear Bunch were going to outwit Eustace P Peevly this time. Not unreasonably, parents assumed that one's theatrical misery was a forgivable symptom of immaturity that would pass within days.
"After all, it's not as if the little devil's going to let this stew for decades and then, well into the next century, write a column about it in The Irish Times," they'd snigger. Ha! Who's laughing now?
No relief comes with adulthood. The last few decades have seen an unstoppable rise in the festival of salmonella and singed arm-hair that is the barbecue. Society folk who would normally baulk if served anything that had not been marinated in the juices of some rare Mediterranean citrus fruit will now happily scoff pink hamburgers and sweating sausages as long as those unlovely comestibles are served in uncomfortable sunlight. And don't get me started on picnics.
Now, I am well aware that many of you will have happy childhood memories of kicking a scuffed ball about the dusty streets before being dragged reluctantly into tea by a mother who despaired of keeping you in the house. Sometimes, when your bones ache, you will gaze out the window and remember endless summers spent gambolling by chuckling streams and chasing otters in the verdant undergrowth.
Well this is my column, so tough luck. Why don't you go away and write a book about your painful coming-of-age in a simpler, sweeter time and, while you're at it, include some stuff about drinking golden wine and eating bitter olives in the back garden of a crumbling Tuscan farmhouse? People love that stuff. You'll make a million. Me? I'm off to watch some television.