The history of this old world of ours is broken down into different periods - as you all know - reaching back into the assault and battery of the Pre-Cambrian, when the weather was perfectly foul, up through the Silurian, the Triassic, the Cretaceous and so on. In more recent times we had the Pleistocene, with its Ace Age, followed by the Holocene, in which the climate grew warmer, enabling warm-blooded creatures to move back into previously uninhabitable areas such as Ballymena, which they soon wished had remained uninhabitable.
The Holocene - like all of these eras, there are complex reasons why it is so named - was cut short in the late 1990s when scientists in Ireland began to detect another change in climate, requiring an entirely new name.
Naming epoch
These meterologists dug deep into their knowledge of weather, of archaeology and of geology to name this epoch, which they entitled the Noftotoic. At the risk of blinding you with science, I will try to explain to you how this name came about. Meteorologists gazing into the grey, moist permafog covering the island could only snarl in disbelief: This shagging weather. Neither one f---ing thing or the other. NOFTOTO.
Thus the Noftotoic was born; and the more grammatical of you are already jumping up and down shouting that the "or" should be "nor". Good point. But who wants an epoch called The Noftntoic? Makes us all sound as we have speech impediments, as if life during the Noftotoic wasn't bad enough already.
And, following the success of Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg has bought the film rights to the Noftotoic. However, unlike Jurassic Park, with its spectacular special effects, no special effects at all will be needed in the making of Noftotoic Stoic (as its working title goes). Nor, indeed, will colour-film stock or even black-and-white be required. Instead, Spielberg is creating a new kind of film called Technicolorless, in which the cast can be vaguely seen fumbling their way through vast swirling banks of vapour resembling sheepfleece, while out of vision, marooned swampbirds forlornly hoot across desolate marshland (formerly known as pasture), with the odd strangled cry as yet another farmer ends it all. Begob, know it well: Ireland.
It would be wrong to suggest that the Noftotoic consists solely of a diet of rain and cloud (though with the odd, tormenting flash of sunlight jeering between cloud banks). It is actually quite inventive in its sadism. In 1999, the early months of that season once known as summer consisted entirely of an entirely novel, some might even say exciting, form of bleakness. In addition to it being grey, windy and cold at the beginning of the growing season, it was also bone dry. No rain, no rain at all. The landscape quite soon resembled that of Saturn. Apart from odd and perverted lichens, nothing grew. The pasture became a desert, covered in sere and withered grasses. So the agricultural classes turned to lichen-farming instead.
Oxtail soup
No sooner had the lichen crop been planted than the Noftotoic unleashed the next weapon from its dismal armoury: driving rain, plummeting out of battleship-grey skies, cold and violent and ceaseless, hitting the lichen firmly on its not very intelligent head. Lichen-farming was wiped out, and the baked clay of the Irish pasture was transformed into oxtail soup, across which the odd farmer could be seen doing the Australian crawl, rounding up his latest cattle, a new breed of porpoise.
Meanwhile, an entire generation was growing in Ireland for whom the term "horizon" makes as much sense as "iceberg" does to a Toureg or "toothache" to a jellyfish. Even for sophisticated human minds, horizon became an extraordinarily complex abstraction, rather like E = MCs2 degrees, which makes perfect sense to all 13 people in the world who understand the mathematics of relativity, but no-one else. The speed of light squared indeed; yes, and my name's Leonardo da Vinci and mine's a pint. Thank you.
Baffling concept
How could young people of the Noftotoic even begin to understand the baffling concept of "horizon" when most of them are so unused to any kind of visibility that they think "see" means just a division within the Catholic Church? And yes, of course they know what sky is: it's remedial television for people who have been hit on the head by dumpertrucks. Sight? Something you build a house on. Colour? Clothing around the neck. Sunburn? Boy-child belonging to the Garda Commissioner. Ambre Solaire? Bloke under a big Mexican hat. Summer? Difficult bit of arithmetic, but not hard as summest. Autumn? DART-speak for hole-in-the-wall. Spring? Chap in Kerry. Winter? Indistinguishable from the ATM, or the moustachoied lad below in Tralee or that fellow asleep in Tijuana. Noftoto.
One extraordinary feature of the Noftotoic was the number of visitors who came to sample its grey expanses. Romans tottered in little clusters of baffled Italianness, fingering the cold fog like old, wet bed-linen, and uttering sad, curious cries in Italian. Germans stood in martial groups, wondering how on earth one could deploy panzers in such conditions. Americans blinked forlornly, and in plaintive voices, said: "This goddamn weather. Neither one f---ing thing or the other."
Precisely. The Noftotoic.