An Irishwoman's Diary

ON A DAY at the height of this mottled grey summer, in the Aldi supermarket in Killarney, a man I know to be a thinker strode…

ON A DAY at the height of this mottled grey summer, in the Aldi supermarket in Killarney, a man I know to be a thinker strode up to me as if he had just hit on something from the Book of Revelations: “It’s like a nuclear winter,” he said, marching off with his shopping bag.

A struggle has been taking place all summer in the southwest to come to terms with the truly awful weather here, even as, further up the country, Frank McNally was compiling his list of rain terms, which has captured the imagination of letter-writers.

A subtle front has opened here too on coming up with terms to address the weather.

And while the man with the nuclear winter, when the sky was on its knees to the Earth, was precise on the day, others, women in particular, have taken a more climatic or long-term approach.

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The mother of my daughter’s close friend has insisted all summer, in a deliberate brace against the wind, on repeating “Tis a soft day” regardless of the “shades of grey” outside.

The turbulence has left my sister in Lismongane determined – as she sat alongside a roaring fire, with the wind howling outside – that she couldn’t stick “all that heat there is in other countries anyway”. This while she was on Skype to her daughter sweltering in 40 degrees near Toledo.

Expectations have dropped universally: a fairly dull day is considered nice. And then there is the “real rain”, as in “thank God there’s no ‘real rain’ today”. And there has been the great luck in not having the floods they’ve had to face somewhere else.

A sharper-tongued woman has bitten, “This is Ireland for God’s sake, what do people expect!”

But I am struck by the difference between here and the Touraine in France, where I was earlier this summer and where the weather was not great either.

The days are still allied to saints in those parts and almost every day seems further delineated with a weather proverb.

One from the end of July struck particularly: “Pluie d’été, comme pleurs des enfants, ne dure pas longtemps.” Summer rain, like the tears of children, does not last. (Well, maybe this is true of around Richelieu!)

A silver moon in late July promises good weather, a white moon a “journée franche” or clear day, and a pale moon augurs a day on which “l’eau dévale”, a day of tumbling rain, which I like to translate as a devil of a day.

St Abel’s (August 5th) is the time to make mirabelle plum jam. Quite a lot of the weather lore in France has to do with the vendange, where it is arguable wine is less needed against the happy coincidence of blue skies.

According to St Roch, “la grande chaleur – prépare du vin la couleur”, it is said of a mid-August day, while good weather on St Bernard’s Day, August 20th, means he ripens the late wheat.

I know only bits of proverbs in English to do with weather lore. And of the Irish, which according to the 1911 census was the principal language of both sets of my great-grandparents from near Killarney, I have fewer still.

I know of course that a windy day was not one for thatching – “Ni hé lá na gaoithe lá no scolb”. But there is not much thatching any more.

But an Irish website www.masterit.ieoffered interesting examples that demonstrate the kind of stoic attitude I witnessed among women this summer.

“Dá mbeadh soineann go Samhain, bheadh breall ar dhuine éigin.” If there was good weather until November (end of year – in Celtic Ireland Samhain began the new year), someone would have cause for complaint. I could see my sister or the mother of my daughter’s friend saying that.

But then “Ní bheidh sé ag fearthainn i gcónaí” – it won’t always be raining . This, according to the site, was to encourage someone depressed. It is just as well this is no longer in the folk memory as it wouldn’t at all be uplifting this summer.

“Is olc an ghaoth nach séideann do dhuine éigin” – it is a bad wind that does not blow (bring good) to somebody, is a phrase that exists in almost every European language and is as general as the wind.

Mind you, in the south this is usually “Tis an ill wind . . .” We don’t finish it. Maybe we can’t.

If I look for English weather lore, there are hundreds of proverbs too, and not just red skies at the sunset and sailors and all that. There is the concise “Clear moon, frost soon.” And all sorts of things about lunar portents and years of snow being years of plenty.

And there is the St Swithun’s Day, the feast day of the Anglo Saxon bishop of Winchester on July 15th, and his 40 days of rain (also known as St Swithin’s Day – he has suffered from the great Anglo Saxon vowel shift, perhaps). But Swithun is an alien enough saint in Ireland and has been introduced through Joe Duffy, I suspect.

I am amazed there is no weather proverb associated with St Anthony’s Day in Ireland, as he is a much more familiar saint to us.

The Holy Child of Prague is of course still left out the evenings before weddings, no matter what time of the year and in all parts.

But generally weather lore, a localised and oral affair, seems to have retreated like the saints in the south.

Irish was, only a century or less ago, the main language in these parts, and perhaps we never really came to terms with the weather in the English we speak.

Curiously enough, the nearest I got to real local weather lore was on the one fine day we had this summer, August 10th, on the opening day at Puck Fair in Killorglin, when a man from Currow near Castleisland observed to another about miraculous once-off hay-making which supposedly took place in Cork in late July this wet summer: “There’s no sun in late July, and there’s no hay without sun,” he said bluntly, dismissing the idea of hay this summer, like those fundamentalist Christians who are against any kind of miracles associated with weather. I hadn’t heard this one before, but it surely smacked of mid-Kerry knowledge, built up over the decades, and in English. A ray of hope for weather terms perhaps?