Dublin Bus picked a bad time to announce its new seven-day rambler ticket on Tuesday. Even as the dramatic full-page ads challenged the public to "Get Rambling Now!", the overnight snow was causing chaos with public transport, making short, organised trips difficult, never mind rambles. One could question the wisdom of promoting a "rambling" service in the first place. My dictionary defines the word as "wandering, disconnected, desultory, incoherent; (of houses, streets, etc) irregularly planned". An unkinder column than this might suggest rambling is thus a cruel, if all too accurate, description of the city's public transport.
It was doubly unfortunate that the advertisers chose the motif of blue sky and desert to promote the service. Global warming is a serious problem, we know. But even before the snow this seemed premature, given that the furthest you can travel on the new ticket is Newtownmountkennedy.
In fairness to the advertisers, many people were caught out by the weather, and Aer Rianta narrowly escaped worse embarrassment. On Sunday, it published equally dramatic ads pointing out, inter alia, that 69 airlines now used Dublin Airport. "That's why airlines that really want to go places fast come to Dublin first," read the copy: then the airport closed all day Tuesday, as airlines that wanted to go places fast were diverted to Cork and Shannon.
Kylie Minogue was stranded too, and my sympathies if you were one of those ticket-holders seduced by the posters of her as a beach goddess draped across a backdrop of sea and sky, with a setting sun kissing her neck and a G-string hanging on, but only just.
Sadly the tour slogan - "On a night like this" achieved unexpected poignancy when the weather forced postponement of the Irish gig because the sets couldn't be transported. Undaunted, a spokesman promised spectacular shows in the UK, and he surely wasn't joking when he said one of the most dramatic features would be the "costume changes".
Even some of the best prepared travellers were caught out. Take the indoor ant community: the now-traditional harbingers of spring - in our house, anyway. Highly organised and usually well-informed, they arrived under the skirting boards last Sunday, setting up communication lines with the garden as they prepared to establish their annual summer camp in the living room. What a shock they got. Monday, it was almost balmy. Tuesday, they were in the Kingdom of the Ice Bear. By Wednesday, the ants appeared to be back in hibernation; at any rate, the tour has been postponed.
But it wasn't only advertisers, Australian beach goddesses and insects who were disturbed. As this newspaper reported on Wednesday, Ireland suffers from "a combination of infrastructural deficit and a certain culture shock" every time it snows. This is undoubtedly true, but never mind snow: the fact is many of us suffer culture shock every time it rains!
I'm a classic case of this climatological self-delusion, and I suspect you are too. For example, whenever a prolonged dry spell of, say, three days suddenly ends, do you feel personally betrayed? Do you look at the sky and think: how could this happen? Do you find you have no umbrella, because you left the last one on the bus when the only reminder that you had it, i.e. the rain, stopped, and your profound conviction that it would never rain again was restored?
I know it's not just me, because, as a whole, we fail to dress for the weather a lifetime of experience and all recorded history tells us to expect. We're not quite as unprepared as Kylie, but at the slightest encouragement we still dress for a climate the nearest incidence of which is on the Mediterranean coast. Where we all came from, admittedly, but that was 6,000 years ago! And if we're still not prepared for rain, what chance snow?
GETTING back to public transport, a friend who lives in a posh part of Dublin complained recently that overcrowding on the DART is now worse than anything on the Indian railway system. I travelled on the Indian railway system four years ago, in fact, but I haven't been on the rush-hour DART for a decade, so I couldn't comment.
In our part of town, luckily, we don't have the DART, although overcrowding on public transport is a problem. The backbone of the local system is the so-called "City Imp": the diminutive bus with the slogan "Go minic anseo, go tapaidh ansuid" (literally: "If you think this looks small from the outside, wait until you're on") and enough seats to accommodate an average-sized family, provided no one has luggage.
Ours is the first stop on the route, so there are always seats. But at the second stop, almost invariably, seven or eight pensioners get on. And when you give up your seat, as you do, there's no room to stand and little to hold on to, so that the rest of the trip is like being transported, horizontally and around corners, in a crowded lift.
The problem is exacerbated by the unusually high number of eccentrics in our area, who are not suited to confined spaces. Sometimes I've had to get off early, out of sheer embarrassment. But you'll have to excuse me now - I'm rambling.
Frank McNally can be contacted at fmcnally@irish-times.ie