Tara Flynn’s Irish Summer: ‘Blue legs on a grey beach and picnics in the car’

Blue legs on a grey beach. That’s the truth of it. The predominant features of family summer photos taken in Ireland. Coke ads, mocking us, with people playing volleyball on golden beaches, not composed of mud; or bursting for air from golden-dappled lakes, or pulling cans from icy coolers, rolling them on foreheads, beaded with sweat from something called “the sun”? We knew not of this “sun”. For when it showed its face, we scalded ours through sheer unfamiliarity. We didn’t know - or, to be more accurate, we didn’t remember. It had been too long. “Don’t look directly at it!” But we did, because we’d forgotten what happened the last time. And slathered ourselves in olive oil and lemon, basting, turning, basting again til we were fully cooked.

The day the sun came out, we took off all our clothes and ran through sprinklers.

The day the sun came out, we turned back into firbolgs, naked and cooking only over naked flames or charred coals. Not ourselves, this time, but actual meat. Keep your “inside electric cooking machine” - what sorcery is that? We only know the outdoor ways. Cookers are for winter folk. We know no winters here.

But next day, town would be invisible for rain. The hard boiled eggs you made with picnic plans as cold now as your enthusiasm for going past your door ever again. But you said you’d have a picnic. So YOU WOULD HAVE A PICNIC.

Everybody in the car. Isn’t this nice? Isn’t it fun? We’re all together in the car, which is practically outside! If only you could see outside.

Parked up at some beauty spot, with the hard boiled eggs and sandwiches and steaming tea misting the windows even more than singing along with the radio had done. Little is more effective for coating a car in condensation than a family of four enthusiastically playing I Spy when there is nothing to see.

We tried the beach. We tried. Like Shackleton, we tried - intrepid and determined and armed with whatever equipment we could carry that might ensure our survival. Buckets, spades, of course. You must keep moving or the frost will come, even in June. Wind breakers: never a more vital use for fabric and sticks. And flasks. More than one. Maybe a flask each. With cordial and juice and tea.

The chips. The chips! You ate them not for food but also heat. Your hands coming back to life as your tastebuds, tickled by vinegar, jumped for joy. That’d be worth a kick of your wellied-legs, as you sat on a wall too tall for you.

The books. Big piles of not-yet-read discovery and fun and even sun, adventure, fact and knowledge you didn’t know and didn’t hear at school. Heroes, zeroes, not a one of them weather-dependent.

Oh, shorts! We wore them anyway. We wear them still and this is wise: if it rains (and it will rain) it’s easier to dry a leg than a jean. Bare legs are simply practical. But also, when but now will you get a chance to get the vitamin D all the way down to your toes? If not now, when? The residents of Ireland have the least vitamin-D’d phalanges in Europe. FACT.

Ne’er cast a clout til May be out can suck it. The weather never lets us catch a break: it’s summer when we say so. So get those blue legs out and let them shine.