Weathering the weather is year-round task

When things get bad, meteorologists are apt to blow the dust from their ample stacks of weather records and produce, with an irritating flourish - something altogether worse.

The current summer is a case in point. Complain about any unseasonal chill or persistent bouts of rain and they will point you in the direction of 1980, or 1985 or 1994, when the summers really were intolerably awful; the glorious ones like 1995 and 1976 were very much, they say, exceptions to the general Irish rule.

Nearly 20 years apart, and that, unfortunately, is about the average for prolonged sun and warmth like that. European summers are always something of a lottery. The high pressure systems of several weeks' duration that become established from time to time are temporary seasonal extensions of the semi-permanent anticyclone in the vicinity of the Azores. In an almost random way, they may develop over central Europe, occasionally over Ireland and Britain, or, perhaps, as happened a little while ago, over the Mediterranean to bring heat waves to Cyprus, Greece and Turkey. In some years, like this one, they are ephemeral and last only a little time, wherever they appear. In any event, good weather throughout southern Europe almost invariably has its antithesis in a steady procession of depressions marching across the Atlantic to bring wind and rain to Ireland, Britain and most of Scandinavia.

But has it really been that bad? June 2000 in Ireland was relatively dry, and although it was cooler than it ought to have been for the first part of the month, it got much warmer later on; in fact June 18th provided a record for the highest June temperature ever recorded, when the thermometer registered 28 degrees at Casement Aerodrome.

Much was made across the Irish Sea about this July being the dullest English one for aeons, but here in Ireland there was some magnificent weather from the 15th to 27th of the month. Some parts experienced a great deal of rain; but then it was patchy, and many areas were spared.

Hot weather has its downside, such as a bearing on the frequency of certain accidents. Some years ago, a team of Irish orthopaedic surgeons produced a study which related the occurrence of broken limbs in children to certain types of weather.

Understandably, they found that these were more frequent in summer when children are more out and about playing rough-and-tumble games. But they also found that on days when the number of hours of sunshine was above average, hospital admissions for such injuries were more than double that for cloudy days. Sunshine, obviously, can be very dangerous.

But then so can normal Irish weather. The conditions typical of the approach of a warm front - rising temperature, falling pressure, increasing humidity, freshening winds and approaching rain - have been found by some researchers to be positively related to the occurrence of coronaries, ulcers and migraine. And on a more sombre note, some studies have found suicides are significantly more frequent when weather fronts are passing regularly than they are in quiet anti-cyclonic conditions. So perhaps any kind of weather can be dangerous.

Be that as it may, a warm sunny spell affects our buying habits. When the sun is shining, for example, no one wants to eat a melting chocolate bar, but sales of take-home beers flourish at the expense of the stronger and less thirst-quenching stouts and heavy ales. Sandwich bars, too, find that beef sandwiches are popular in cool weather, but that chicken takes off - figuratively, of course - with temperatures. During rainy periods we drink more coffee than usual while in sunny weather we tend to drink more tea.

Salad ingredients obviously sell in large quantities during a hot, sunny spell. But researchers have found a subtle relationship between soft drink consumption and the weather: sales of minerals soar when the temperature reaches about 15 degrees but above that threshold, temperature has little effect and further increases in sales are related only to increasing hours of sunshine.

And perhaps most surprisingly of all, it has been discovered that the sales of bread are directly related to the temperature: they fall off dramatically as the temperature rises day by day in anti-cyclonic conditions, and climb as the weather, once again, grows cooler. An occurrence with which we are all too familiar . . .