"I was hungry for a feast of the summer glory, and filled with a desire to dim the workshop lustre of my brand new Wexford wheel." Thus begins William Bulfin's Rambles in Eirinn, a travel memoir that cannot be said to have aged very well but which, at one time, had an honoured place on every Irish bookshelf. Few of us beyond a certain age have escaped the youthful tedium of ploughing through its zestful pages.
As he travelled the length and breadth of Ireland on his bicycle, little escaped Bulfin's beady eye and thoughtful observation. But he is particularly percipient, and sometimes even lyrical, on our Irish weather and, most especially, our rain.
"Irish rain of the summer and autumn," he asserts, "is a kind of damp poem. It is humid fragrance, and it has a way of stealing into your life which disarms anger. It is a soft, apologetic, modest kind of rain, as a rule; and even in its wildest moods, it gives you the impression that it is treating you as well as it can under the circumstances."
Had he been here a week or two ago, Bulfin might have been less emphatic in his declaration that our rain "does not come heralded by dust and thunder, and accompanied by lightning and roaring tempests, like the rain of the tropics; nor does it wet you to the bones in five minutes".
But you know exactly what he means when he says: "You scarcely know when it begins. It grows on you by degrees. It comes on the scene veiled in soft shadows and hazes, and maybe a silver mist."
After the arrival of the first tentative drop, he says, "another comes presently, and you feel it on your cheek. Then a few more come. Then the rest of the family encircle you shyly.
"They are not cold or heavy or splashy. They fall on you as if they were coming from the eyes of many angels weeping for your sins. They caress you rather than pelt you, and they are laden with perfume from the meadow flowers, or the glistening trees, or the sweet, rich earth, or the heathery bogland.
"They soak you all the same," says William Bulfin. "They fold you in, do those spells of Irish rain, and make of you a limp, sodden, unsightly thing in their soft embraces. But I forgive the rain. It has spoiled many a lovely day for me, still the memory of it is one that I would not part with for gems and gold."