1997: the year of the drench

Summer times mean different things to different people. Yeats, for example, using words of which we have to be more careful nowadays, yearned for "the Junes that were warmer than these are, when the waves were more gay". Raymond Chandler, however, had no time for such nostalgia, and wrote of the searing torrid heat of a Los Angeles summer when "meek wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study the back of their husbands' necks". And Lord Byron, uncharacteristically pessimistic, spoke of "the English winter, ending in July to recommence in August".

Byron's English model wins hands down in 1997. Of course the summer is not entirely over yet, but as we slowly draw the curtain on the designated months we have enough information to paint a reasonable picture - and a very dismal image it turns out to be. There were few holes in the 1997 clouds to let the sunshine in; disconsolation prospered undispelled.

The statistics, by and large, agree with everybody's first impressions, showing a summer that was dull and wet, with Nature perhaps redressing the balance for the drought she landed on us back in March and April. Of the three months, July was marginally best. Although from memory it may not seem so, it gave us a few dry, warm and sunny spells; rainfall was below average in the east and south; sunshine, mirabile dictu, was above the normal for July; and the average temperature was a full half a degree above the norm.

The people of Mayo, however, might take such statistics with a grain of salt: the highlight of their month, if one can call it that, was the exceptional fall of rain near Bangor Erris which caused local landslides and a memorable flash flood. But it was nice nearly all the time in Donegal.

July was preceded by a decidedly unYeatsian June. It began well enough with a continuation of the dry settled weather that had marked the end of May, but quickly became unsettled, dull and rather cold. The so-called sunny south-east experienced more than 260 per cent of normal rainfall to make it the wettest June for more than 40 years. But it was dry and warm and sunny up in Donegal. And August 1997 might be best forgotten. But few - least of all, I and my red-faced colleagues in Glasnevin - will forget for a long time the severe flooding and torrential rain of the August bank holiday weekend; well over 200 millimetres, or three times the expected rainfall in a full summer month, were recorded over the holiday period in many of the worst affected areas in the southern half of the country. Some places experienced 160 millimetres in a single day on that memorable Sunday, and the ensuing floods brought memories of Hurricane Charley back in 1986. It has been a dull, damp August - "muggy" as they seem to like to call it nowadays - and the wettest on record at many places. Meanwhile, the long hot summer up in Donegal continued, and a carving knife or two was taken from the drawer for fondling.

It has been a summer that brought trauma to other regions of the world as well. The floods in eastern Europe - harbingers, it almost seemed in retrospect, of those that came to us in August - seemed to last for weeks and weeks, and had us rushing to our atlases as memories came - well, flooding - back about other kinds of crises years ago along the Oder-Neisse Line.

It was the summer when the troublesome El Nino returned to haunt us years ahead of schedule, and became a household word as it was blamed for everything from showers in Schull to typhoons in the Pacific - and no doubt the blazing sun in Donegal as well. The troublesome infant has almost confessed to being responsible for the prolonged torrential downpours that marked the final setting of the sun upon the British Empire, the handing over of Hong Kong to China.

We here in Ireland have a tendency to be unfair to Irish summers. Perhaps it is because many of us now travel frequently abroad, and disport ourselves at regular intervals beneath the clear, uninterruptible, blue skies of Rhodes or Tenerife; or maybe we look back at 1995 and other exceptional performers in the recent past, and suffer from a Yeatsian inclination to regard them as the norm.

Whatever the reason, there is a popular consensus that the statistical average is bad. A summer that brings us just the average amount of rain, and the normal hours of sunshine, is condemned by all as being poor and mediocre - yet, by definition, it is the norm.

July this year was perhaps a case in point. Statistically it was not a bad month. Despite some local downpours it was dry generally over much of Ireland, temperatures were half a degree above the average, and it was the sunniest July since 1990 over a large area of the country. It was in fact a good July according to the record books - but that is probably not the way that most of us remember it.

It is not easy to find an objective way of measuring the "goodness" of a summer - to encapsulate the entire season in a single number so that the better ones can be identified for fond remembrance, and the poorer examples reviled without injustice. After all, a warm summer that is unpleasantly wet and dull is no less mediocre than a bright one characterised by chilly winds. But there is little doubt that most of us would remember 1995 as being the best summer of recent times. Next best of the candidates during the past 30 years or so, and probably in order of their merit, were the summers of 1976, 1975, 1989 and 1983. The "gotcha" prizes for the worst summers in recent memory go to 1986, 1985, and 1980.

So can we say anything good at all about this dying summer of 1997? Well up until last Tuesday night it wasn't very windy - and yes, of course! - it was a brilliant summer up in Donegal.