`Is there in the world a climate more uncertain than our own?" asks William Congreve, the early 18th-century English novelist. "And which is the natural consequence, is there anywhere a people more unsteady, more apt to discontent, more saturnine, dark and melancholic than ourselves?"
Of course, we first assume that he means the English, and therefore are inclined to nod the head. But when you discover that he spent his schooldays in Kilkenny, and went on to be a friend of Swift's at Trinity, it makes you think that maybe it was us, the Irish, that he spoke of after all. And in these dark, dull, dreary days of winter one can quite believe that maybe he was right.
But let me cheer you up today with talk of summer skies and sunshine. The Monthly Weather Bulletin is a slender booklet published by Met Eireann, available on subscription for a modest fee. It is an up-to-date compendium of information, facts and figures on the weather of the previous month, with graphs and tables and convenient summaries. This year's September issue awards the Oscars for the summers of the century.
The winner is - and it will come as no surprise - that memorable summer of 1995. It was the warmest and the driest of the century, with August temperatures above 20C in Dublin nearly every afternoon, and often exceeding 25C: it had a daily average of eight hours' sunshine.
The runner-up was 1976. The summer months of that year were warm and dry, and only 7 mm of rain occurred in Dublin during the whole of August. The long dry spell brought serious drought to many places, but this problem was largely solved by the copious rains of September and October.
At the other end of the scale, the bulletin's accolade for the worst summer of the century goes to 1912, the year of the Titanic, when icebergs in the north Atlantic came much farther south than usual. June and July were cool, dull and wet, and the temperatures in August were more typical of October. And here the runner-up was relatively recent. In 1986 June and July were unexceptional, but August was cool, dull and windy and provided a piece de resistance in the form of Hurricane Charlie on the 25th which brought some of the worst flooding of the century to the east and south.
Oh dear! This was supposed to cheer you up this winter morning, rather than have you echo poor King John in Shakespeare's play:
I beg cold comfort, and you are so straight
And so ungrateful you deny me that.