That was it. February. Over. No more February 2006s for any of us, ever again. February is the worst month of all, unredeemed by anything save its brevity.
Unlike the months which accompany it in the first half of the year, it does not bear the name of a god, but takes its title from februa, a Roman feast of purification. Two-faced Janus, warlike Mars, the comely Aphrodite, the beguiling Maia and the winsome Juno, goddess of marriage, provide the names for the other months of the first half of the year, before the stately pomp of imperial Rome gives us July and August, and then the autumn's numerical misnomers begin.
February is an orphan, and deservedly. It is the quintessence of Irish weather. It is what one wants to apologise most for in conversations with foreigners. And that is itself a curiosity. For one of the defining characteristics of Irishness is a desire to apologise for everything - and there are indeed grounds for apologising for certain events. If you accidentally behead your neighbour with an egg-spoon, most etiquette rulebooks would say that a whispered apology is in order, if only to his widow. A donation of the egg-spoon to help with school fees is probably appropriate. If you have harpooned Mabel, the local Church of Ireland bishop's wife, at the fund-raising fete for the cathedral roof, a few words of regret would not go amiss, if only on the wreath.
But to apologise for matters over which we have no control is very bizarre, and very Irish. Yet I have trouble preventing myself from feeling a deep personal guilt over my abject and pitiable failure to lay on some sunshine for the poor Ibo, Yoruba, Maya, Eskimos and Inca at the supermarket check-out. Indeed, if there is any argument against immigration it is this: I find myself having to fight the temptation to apologise in broken tones to strangers for events over which I have as much control as I have over continental drift or the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Abysmal weather is not just an Irish thing, of course. It is at the heart of the English language. If you have ever been in an English mining town in February you know how the language we speak has such a rich vocabulary of certain kinds of words. Hence: grim, drab, grimy, glum, forlorn, dire, bleak, dreary, dour, dismal, gloomy, doleful, for which concepts of grey monotony and spiritual despair the French have essentially just two words: terne and morne, neither of which has the searching onomatopoeic melancholy of the Anglo-Saxon.
Just think about the words which English has had to borrow from the French: élan, verve, flair, nonchalance, esprit, panache, flamboyance, vivacity, vitality, zest, éclat. Why is this? Is it because the French language was developed in a festive, cavalier culture where the month of February is characterised by mardi gras, by oranges ripening in the groves, and where spring is triumphantly erupting, whereas in England - and Ireland, even more so - the landscape for the second month of the year consists of various shades of clay, for which the entire family of onomatopoeia is needed to convey its dreadfulness? Clay. That says it all, doesn't it? For to our ears clay is a mucky, cold, dispiriting sound; yet virtually the same pronunciation, clé, to French ears is light and musical: it is both the key of a lock and the key of music.
Yet the name of the country on so many lips in Latvia, Poland, Estonia and Nigeria is not the land of oranges, where the clay-sound is light and musical, but the land that is farther away, marooned in the Atlantic, where the spinning earth sweeps in cold wet weather systems from a cold wet sea, and clay is the sound that makes your heart sink. For all its grimness, ours - not France - is the land where strangers can now make a living.
But for how much longer will our country continue to attract outsiders? For what capital in Europe could have been host to the appalling scenes we witnessed on the last Saturday in February? None other. There it was in all its horror - the raw, red and violent face of native xenophobia; and if these people can feel like that about fellow white Christian Irish men and women, how do they feel about the Nigerians and the Poles in our midst? Thus, on the last Saturday in February, 2006, we got a rude wake-up call about the pond life in parts of Irish society. We learned that thousands of violent thugs are prepared to destroy their capital city, if not out of tribal hatred then simple greed. For such people, all notion of law, of decency, of property, of restraint and of civility are entirely foreign.
Remember all the Irish jibes last year about those "lawless" Americans looting in New Orleans last year? Ah. No more.
So it's worth bearing in mind that the black girl with the funny accent serving in the supermarket, the Filipino changing your bandages in the hospital, the slender Pole serving you in the restaurant, the Ukrainian builder struggling to make himself understood - why, these are not foreigners at all. Our foreigners are the violent, vicious natives we saw rampaging through Dublin last weekend. February is bad, to be sure, but it lasts only one month in twelve. But those abominable Irish people, they last all 12 months of the year. Unchecked, they could in time destroy us.