An Irishman's Diary

I CAN’T remember now why Edna O’Brien thought August was a wicked month. But it can hardly have been the weather. Because if any month may be accused of wickedness, surely it must be April, which seduces us with its bright evenings and the promise of summer and then, when our trust has been won, betrays us like the cruel Jezebel it is.

There I was last Saturday, for example, thinking: what a perfect afternoon for a run in the Phoenix Park. Yes, the sky was a little moody, and a voice in my head – the one that’s always quoting Shakespeare – remembered a line about the fickleness of love resembling “the uncertain glory of an April day,/Which now shows all the beauty of the sun/And by and by a cloud takes all away!”.

But the temperature was just north of balmy, and that brisk westerly breeze would soon escort any clouds off the premises, I knew. Thus the open spaces beckoned: none more open than the park’s famous Fifteen Acres, ideally situated to maximise the evening sun. With which thought – optimism triumphing over experience, yet again – off I went in my T-shirt and shorts, straight into an ambush.

Half an hour later, hugging the perimeter of the US ambassador’s residence, I noticed for the first time that the brisk westerly – now whistling through my front teeth – was not far off being a gale.

Then the few, scattered rain-drops that had started gathering back in Parkgate Street suddenly multiplied and became a popular movement. And then, after assuming liquid form only long enough to soak my clothes, the raindrops turned into hailstones and began pelting me in the face.

Retreat was futile and shelter far off. The only trees in the vicinity were the ambassador’s, and they were all the other side of his wall. Besides which, this being April, the wind and precipitation were also accompanied by – what else? – lightning.

Sure, any lightning in search of landfall here would probably make for the Papal Cross rather than a mere tree. But April having betrayed me already, I didn’t feel like testing this theory. Instead I ploughed on, into the wind and the hail, trying to find a running rhythm that would complement the chattering of my teeth.

The further I went the more it felt as if an army of invisible, malevolent elves, which had been stockpiling snowballs since January, was lining me up with their full artillery. And naturally, there was no way I was giving the little gurriers the satisfaction of seeing me turn back. So I continued grimly to the Knockmaroon end of the park, where finally I could turn and at least have the wind behind me.

On the long way home, splashing through the muck and with my sodden T-shirt clinging unpleasantly, I tried to distract myself from the misery by means of mathematical and other speculations.

Not for the first time, it struck me that whoever named this area the Fifteen Acres was a damn fool. You wouldn’t have sent him to market with the family cow, that’s for sure. At a rough guess, it looked more like several hundred acres. But squelching through it on Saturday, I tried to do the maths, based on the million people said to have attended the Pope’s mass here.

Assuming the average Irish person to occupy two square feet – a conservative estimate even in 1979 – then, multiplied by a million and divided by the number of square feet in a mile, the total came to . . . well, a lot more than 15 acres, that’s for sure.

Another coping technique I tried was worrying about the effect such weather must be having on the animals in nearby Dublin Zoo. Did giraffes keep their heads down in lightning, I wondered? And how was the new baby gorilla dealing with the conditions? I knew it had been born in late March. But if it turned out to be a girl (the sex was still unknown as late as yesterday), I thought, surely they should call her “April”, after the month now baptising her.

Thanks to this and other meditations, I was only partially traumatised by the time I made it out of the park again on Saturday. The hailstones had long ago turned back to rain. But as I waited, dripping and shivering, for the lights at Parkgate Street to change, the rain became hail one more time: the heaviest deluge yet, coming down so hard it stung my ears and turned the footpath white.

Despite which, there was something almost pleasant about the situation now. Maybe it was the endorphins, or the thought of the hot shower that awaited. But wet as I could be, I also felt suddenly rather cheerful, like a rat emerging from a vat of Guinness.

In fact, noticing the funny looks from people in cars – who no doubt assumed me to have knowingly ventured forth in such conditions – I couldn’t help playing along. “Look at that madman, out jogging in this weather,” they seemed to say. So even as the hailstones hopped off my head and a river rushed down the street past my ankles, I leaned nonchalantly against the lamp-post and smiled back as if to say: “Soft day, thank God.”

* fmcnally@irishtimes.com