Ireland: a softness in the air and a kindness in the hearts

Living in the province of Valencia in Spain gives us a lot of joy. The only serious downside, and it might be a lot more serious in coming years, is the impact of climate change. Summer temperatures climb well into the thirties (Celsius) and the rain just stops. Reservoir levels are dangerously low. Going out, say with the dogs, is uncomfortable – for them as much as for us – except in the early morning or just before dark in the evening.

I know that people like that fine Mr Trump in the US (for whom I wish nothing less than more fuel for his complaints about the electoral system) deny that anything like global warming is happening, but for people like us who are living it, we have a slightly less complacent outlook on our climate.

So it was with some joy that we headed for Ireland a couple of weeks ago. I remember a friend from the English Lake District talking to me about someone who complained to him about the rain.

‘It’s called the Lake District,’ he’d replied, ‘where do you think the lakes come from?’

Ireland is called the Emerald Isle. It doesn’t take long to work out where the green comes from. It was a tremendous relief to us to live in temperatures in the high teens and to see some rain, though of course when it came to locals, we found that we’d simply exchanged one set of complaints for another.

At home, people were saying to us, ‘oh, the heat today! Roll on September. I expect no relief before then.’

In Ireland, I overhead someone talking to her friends saying, ‘I keep waiting for the summer, and it never comes.’

Sunlight and clouds, mountains and sea, in Donegal

Well, it was good to get away from the summer for a while. Perhaps not for too long. I have to admit that grey skies and frequent showers quickly pall on me, reminding me much too much of my youth in England. But I have to confess it was good not to have that oppressive heat weighing me down, or indeed it was even good to remember what it’s like to feel cold, despite a light sweater and jacket (waterproof jacket, of course).

All this culminated in Enniskillen. 

We spent most of our time in Donegal, which has the wonderful distinction of including the most northerly part of Ireland, without being in Northern Ireland. It’s in the Republic. But, often called ‘the forgotten county’, it’s remote from Dublin and most routes to and from it cross the territory of Northern Ireland, which lies within the United Kingdom. That of course is a consequence of the partition of Ireland I talked about earlier this month, a partition agreed at a peace conference in London at which the Irish delegation had been led by Michael Collins. After agreeing to the treaty, he said that he’d just signed his death warrant – as indeed he had.

Enniskillen is in Northern Ireland, and it was on our route back from Donegal to Dublin Airport. I wanted to see it because I’d heard it was a lovely city, on an island between two lakes, or perhaps two sections of the same lake, Lough Erne. Years ago I heard that it never rains in Enniskillen, you just get a ‘softness in the air’.

Well, when we got there, with two friends from Valencia, Concha and Manolo, we found that the air had become immensely soft indeed. So soft that we were soaked within minutes of getting out of our cars. So soaked that Danielle and I both had to change at Dublin airport to avoid flying home in damp clothes and shoes.

That reminded of the words of Winston Churchill, who as a government minister had helped craft the agreement that partitioned Ireland. A year later the tensions between Protestants committed to the Union with Britain and Catholics seeking a united, independent Ireland, had surfaced again, specifically about who should get two of the counties of the North of the island. Churchill talked about how ‘we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again’.

Well, Enniskillen is in County Fermanagh. And I was delighted to be able to take a photo of one of its steeples in the rain. Looking suitably dreary, though it probably wouldn't have, had there been a little sun.

A dreary steeple in Enniskillen, Fermanagh

Fortunately, not everything we experienced in Enniskillen was dreary. On the contrary. When we parked our cars, we found that the pay machines for the car park didn’t allow payment by credit card. A man walking past asked us whether we needed change.

‘It seems we do, and we don’t have any pounds,’ we told him.

Without our asking him for anything, and refusing our offer of euros in return, he reached into his pocket and pulled out two pound coins, enough for our car and our friends’ to stay as long in Enniskillen as we could stand it in the rain. 

You don’t often find someone spontaneously, and enthusiastically, offering money, for nothing in return, to complete strangers. In fact, it’s only happened to me once before. Just ten days earlier, in Donegal, where we were trying to pay for a car park and bemoaning the fact that we didn’t have a euro coin.

‘Do you need a euro coin?’ asked a passing woman, thrusting one into our hands.

Well, the Irish weather may be less than ideal, but the people are great. I remember once, as a much younger man, asking for change for a two-franc coin in Geneva – change, not a gift – and being refused, including by a man who told me that he worked for a living (which I hadn’t doubted in the first place). Spontaneous generosity instead of hard words? Not hard to decide which is preferable.

It was particularly poignant to see such warmth on both sides of a border that has caused such suffering and so much death. The people seem to be one, with only the border to divide them. Ah, the power of religion, to set up such barriers between personalities that have so much in common.

And, to be honest, even if it rains a bit more than I’d like, after a couple of months of roasting summer, the Irish cool and wet were, I admit, a great relief, just as the kindness was a joy.

The pathetic fallacy, or not the weather we hoped for

It was forty-five years ago, but I still remember as if it were yesterday a pronunciation exercise I was given in language classes as part of my French degree.

It proclaimed that if a Frenchman talks about the weather, that means he’s incapable of talking about anything else. But to be a good Englishman, you have to be able to talk about the weather, whether that’s the weather as it is today, the weather of the past or the weather we might have in the future.

I was reminded of this today by a piece of news Danielle mentioned. She’s a member of several groups of expatriates living in the Valencia region. It seems the associated websites are being inundated by regrets from foreigners who have recently moved here.

Certainly, the weather’s giving us plenty of material for English conversations.

My way home from the shops this morning
The heavens weeping at our sad condition?

“We came for the glorious weather. And it just keeps pourng,” they complain.

To which the locals reply, “we love it! You don’t know what you’re wishing for. We know the heat that’s coming. Enjoy this while you can.”

On the more literary side of my degree course, we also studied the so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’. This is the belief that inanimate objects, even the whole of nature itself, can sometimes reflect human moods or events.

One of the most powerful examples is in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. On the day before the Ides of March, a terrible storm strikes Rome. The character Casca is awestruck by it:

I have seen tempests when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
Th' ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam
To be exalted with the threatening clouds,
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.

Yep. Not quite “A deep depression has moved over the East coast of Italy from the Tyrrhenian Sea, bringing high winds and potentially electric storms to Rome.” 

No, this isn’t meteorology. This is the sauciness of humans (got to love that way of putting it) getting right up the noses of the Gods. And, indeed, Rome’s in for a bad time the next day, the Ides, when Julius Caesar will be assassinated.

Windswept moors, as in Wuthering Heights

There are plenty of other examples. Why, the very title of Wuthering Heights uses the pathetic fallacy: ‘wuthering’ is the howling wind worrying away at the people and the buildings it encounters. Again, in Dickens’ Great Expectations, the protagonist Pip comments on the weather just before things turn a bit hairy:

Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs… Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.

Not exactly “turned a bit blowy and wet”, is it? Not “are we ever going to get a Spring?”, either, or “bet Wimbledon gets washed out”. Rather more intense than the usual comments Englishmen tend to make, however expert they may be at talking about the weather. Also rather more portentous, rather more wrapped up with human events than I generally look for in my weather reports.

Well, with all due respect to Shakespeare, Dickens and Emily Brontë, I always took a bit of a supercilious view of all this kind of stuff. “What, the weather reflects moods on Earth? Pull the other one,” I’d tend to say.

Now, though, I’m less sure. Is it simply a coincidence that the weather’s been atrocious for over five weeks now, which is just as long as the Coronavirus lockdown’s lasted in Spain? As any good conspiracy-theorist would say, I think not.

No. With my apologies to those who moved to Valencia for the lovely weather and have found nothing but disappointment so far, I have to say that you may have been caught up in something much bigger than any of us.

This could be the very heavens weeping over our lack of preparedness for the pandemic. Over our terrible and constraining lockdown. Over the illness and death sweeping the world.

Still. At least you can share the awe. This may be the first time that we’ve ever been privileged to see the pathetic fallacy actually borne out in reality.

Something to remember with pride, I’d say, and rejoice in while it lasts.

Now that May is out

Whenever I look down from the aircraft window at the kind and welcoming city of Valencia, where I live but which I’m leaving yet again, I wonder at the irony of an existence that has taken me somewhere so pleasant but prevented me staying there any length of time.

The Jacarandas are flowering in Valencia

The feeling is particularly strong when I leave my home bathed in sunshine in 24-degree weather (the mid-twenties are my favourite, warm enough without being too hot) and I’m heading for England where, the pilot assures us, the temperature has struggled to get into double digits and the rain is chucking it down. Why, I wonder, am I exchanging early summer for mid-autumn?

Joyous welcome at Heathrow

Ah, well. England has many charms – the glorious green, for instance, the upside of all that rain – and I suppose one just has to live with the conditions, doesn’t one? After all, it’s often said of the country that it has no climate, only weather. Cold, wet June? Unexpected, maybe, but Britain is the country where it’s best always to expect the unexpected.

In any case, England has no monopoly on lousy weather. Valencia may have less but when it lets itself go, it can be thoroughly maddening. My family from Scotland joined us in Valencia at Easter and had to put up with day after day of rain, while the weather at home was apparently glorious.

Bad weather is international. Indeed, it provides one of the more entertaining illustrations of the cultural links across nations, at least in Europe. Weather wisdom shows just how strongly we all belong to the same family, across our continent, and that our differences are matters of degree only.

For instance, many countries have old sayings warning people of the need to keep wearing warm clothing later than they might think. In England, for instance, we say:

Ne’er cast a clout till May be out

Just for clarification, this has nothing to do with getting the leader of the Conservative Party out. Theresa May’s out already, and the pantomime to select a successor’s already under way. Topical though it might be to interpret the proverb as relating to her, it is in fact meteorological, not political.

I’ve always enjoyed the double ambiguity of the expression.

The first ambiguity is easy to resolve. Since a ‘clout’ can mean a blow, ‘cast a clout’ sounds like ‘throw a punch’ or slap someone. But it only takes a moment’s reflection to realise that in this context, ‘clout’ must be clothing in some archaic form of English, so we’re being told, ‘take off not a single article of clothing’.

But what about ‘May’? It could mean the month of May. My suspicion, though, and other authorities seem to agree, is that it might mean the ‘mayflower’, hawthorn. So don’t abandon any of your clothing until the hawthorn’s in bloom – which happens at the end of April or beginning of May. A little early, in my judgement, given my experience of what an England do in late April or early May.

Hawthorn in bloom:
England can be lovely when the may is out

The French are more explicit:

En avril, ne te découvre pas d’un fil; en mai, fais ce qu’il te plait

“In April, don’t take off so much as a thread; in May, do what you like.” France is further south, of course, so maybe they can afford to take more of a chance.

Strangely, though, travelling further south still, to Spain, leads to a far less optimistic view of the weather prospects:

Hasta el cuarenta de mayo, no te quites el sayo

“Until the fortieth of May, don’t take off the tunic.” Possibly they mean a smock, rather than a tunic. It’s a more rustic form of traditional clothing, and I suppose most of these weather proverbs have agricultural roots.

Isn’t it amusing that all three nations have such similar advice? All three use a little epigram, with an internal rhyme and a witty structure, to generate a smile and stick in the memory. There is only a small difference on the dates. But that’s a mere detail, in contrast to the similarities between nations that obviously belong to the same family and have so much culture in common.

It’s curious, too, that the Spanish advise going right into June before casting a clout. The fortieth of May would be the tenth of June. That felt inappropriate as I made for the airport this morning, on just that date, through the sun and warmth.

It seemed far more applicable in England, where the pilot had to warn us about stepping from the plane to the jetway, where driven rain had made the floor slippery. And where the first thing I had to do once I’d recovered my suitcase was pull out a sweater and a waterproof jacket (yes, I’d had a little foresight).

In England, I had to put on an extra clout or two though May was well out. For any understanding of the word May: blossom, month or Conservative leader.

Wet-towel time: a useful indicator for a forbidden subject

A couple of pronunciation exercises from the early days of my studies of French stick in my mind. Roughly translated, the first was:

When an Englishman meets an Englishman, he says ‘how do you do?’, and the other replies, ‘how do you do?’ When a Frenchman meets a Frenchman, he says ‘how do you do?’ and the other starts talking about his health.

The second exercise was:

When a Frenchman talks about the weather, that simply means he’s incapable of talking about anything else. But to be a good Englishman, you have to know how to talk about the weather, the weather we have had, the weather are having, and the weather we might have in the future.

Both are simply encapsulations of national stereotypes, of course, but they contain a grain of truth – particularly the second. However, in defence of the English obsession with the weather, can I just say that we have plenty to be obsessed about?

Today is the Summer Solstice, at least up here in the Northern Hemisphere. That means that from now on we’re heading back towards winter, with the days getting shorter, day by day by day. That’s the natural order of things, and in itself nothing to complain about. 

Except that that we’ve still had nothing that could properly be called a summer. Just a couple of nights ago, we lit a fire to take the chill off the living room. Last week, I turned up drenched at work, although the walk from the station to the office only takes fifteen minutes, most of it under cover.

Applying my own criterion, the weather at the moment fails what I think of as the wet-towel test.

Britain failed the wet-towel test this year
Lamentably

Towels get dried in the summer by hanging them on the line outside. Dried by sun and air they come back in feeling fresh, fluffy and enjoyable.

In the winter, they get dried by hanging above a radiator pumping out heat. They end up less fresh but just as dry, and even warm. A process which leaves them equally enjoyable.

There is, however, an awkward transition. In the spring and autumn, there’s an intermediate period when the weather’s not cold enough for central heating, but not dry enough for hanging towels outside. This is what I think of as the wet-towel time. It usually lasts two or three weeks.

This year it’s lasted since April. On and on and on. Hang a towel out of doors, and it would come back sopping wet with rain. Put the heating on and you swelter indoors. The consequence? Every morning I have to dry myself with a towel still damp from the day before.

Which is not enjoyable.

And a pretty dismal statement about the state of the British weather.

The weather a forbidden subject? Well, OK, maybe. But this year it’s gone beyond a joke. Honestly, my dear, it’s just too ghastly for words. 

Apart from these few I’ve written about it.