Wasn't last weekend just smashing all the same? By 2 p.m. on Saturday, I was lying on the beach, soaking in the sun, dribbling sun cream on my legs and wondering idly whether I was in Ireland at all. It could have been the Algarve or the south of France, although I would question a remark heard later that day, that it was, in fact, like Nigeria. A much better epithet for the day was that it was "miraculous" because, whatever about divine intervention, there was certainly something of heaven about it.
When the weather in Ireland is glorious, it makes you wonder why on earth you'd live anywhere else in the world. Invariably too, I start to wonder what Ireland would be like if it was sunny all the time. What seismic shifts of personality and culture would take place, if Ireland were bathed in sunshine for at least six months of the year?
In many ways, it isn't too difficult an image to conjure up because the Irish are surprisingly adept at responding to a sunny day. Considering we get about six of them a year, it's remarkable just how quickly the Irish are able to rustle up a pair of skimpy shorts, a plan for a barbecue and, if you live in certain postcodes, a convertible car. Overnight we look like we've always lived in a sweltering continental climate. The cars are a particularly impressive bit of planning - people obviously rise at 6 a.m., check the weather reports and hot-foot it down to their nearest car dealership, because you never see these swathes of open-top cars the rest of the year.
Quite apart from the material preparations, there's a mental adjustment to good weather, which the Irish are also capable of making in record time. Met Eireann's Gerald Fleming has only to twinkle his way through the words "record high" and "hottest day so far", and the Irish are converted from a rain-sodden, oppressed Celtic race into a Mediterranean people, mistakenly washed up in northern Europe by a freak flood of olive oil, red wine and ouzo.
All along Pearse Street and Ringsend, people bring their kitchen chairs out onto the pavements and take to outdoor living as though their extensive terrazos had just gone on a sneaky holiday. People stop and chat to neighbours they've ignored for years, and temporarily forget the unspoken rule that talking to strangers implies some kind of madness. I was sung to by a group of builders around the corner from work, and rather than sniffing my way past them, I stopped and laughed.
It's all very seductive, this warm, cosy feeling of community that a few good days engenders, but could it be that good weather has a more powerful effect still? One of my friends truly believes that the huge economic and social turnaround in Ireland can in part be attributed to the good summer of 1995. Do you remember it? Even allowing for the colour-enhancing effects of nostalgia, it was a phenomenal run of good weather when you could plan outdoor parties a week in advance and lay out your clothes for the next day the night before.
The friend's theory is that this was the first time an entire generation of young people, who were brought up to believe you were wise to get out of Ireland as quickly as possible, were introduced to the idea that Ireland could be a good place to live. Like never before, Ireland became a place where people made plans and started ventures, whether it was plotting outdoor raves or selling dancing pixies to Americans on Grafton Street. When they had time off, there was a pavement culture there to be enjoyed. Of course, sitting on the pavement outside the Stag's Head was hardly the street society of St Mark's Square or Beaubourg, but it was a start.
It's a marvellously neat theory to explain the swing away from emigration towards internal economic growth, and I think we should start offering it as an economic solution to other countries wishing to emulate Ireland's success: "You want to get a run of good weather and Bob's your uncle." Then again, perhaps the positive effect of good weather in Ireland says more about the dynamics of change than it does about the benefits of a high temperature. In other words, it doesn't really matter whether it's good weather, a street festival or a suddenly pedestrianised street, it's the change in routine that matters.
Living in Ireland we are lucky to have a society and culture relatively free of massive upheaval - elections tend to come and go without riots, there are no queues for food or water, and no sudden coups, uprisings or rebellions. Obviously, this is something to be hugely thankful for, yet I sometimes think that we are all in danger of sinking like sediment under the weight of our own civilisation, while the unstable, effervescent bubbles rise to the top elsewhere.
When Orson Welles added the following lines to Graham Greene's screenplay of The Third Man, he produced a quotable quote that has a peculiar resonance: "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." A little tough on the Swiss, but you can see his point - nobody would wish for bloodshed and warfare but it does have its creative side.
Sunshine, of course, is a completely different ballgame to the horrors of war, but in its own small way, it can have similarly invigorating effects. We get so little of it in Ireland that we tend to get very over-excited at its arrival - it's not so much a change of temperature as an event. I've no doubt that the boom was favourably affected by the very freakiness of that hot summer of 1995 - it was different, it opened up new avenues, it meant you could wear wacky shorts. Other upheavals that affect every level of society have a similar effect.
One of the best memories of my childhood is of the petrol strikes and the ritual of queuing at petrol stations - if you live in the country and keep yourselves to yourselves, a two-hour long queue, full of chat and strangers offering you tea out of a thermos, is remarkably exciting. More recently there was the bus and DART strikes - hugely inconvenient they may have been, but I saw more people chatting animatedly at bus stops than I ever have seen before.
In the last week, I've heard two separate groups of people refer to Dublin as Rut City, and for all I know, Limerick, Cork and Galway have similarly damning nicknames. In all the talk of changing times, it often goes unsaid that most people's lives don't change all that much from year to year. When I went off to travel for some months, I lost count of the number of people who advised me not to worry about missing out on life at home. They rightly pointed out that nothing really changes. Bars come and go, friends leave and return, cinema complexes get new names and property prices rise, but a huge amount stays the same.
So, is it any surprise that when something like a small heatwave comes along, we all get rather over-excited? It's a bit different, it breaks down the miniature dams of society and it kicks us out of our routine. But thank goodness we don't get that kind of heat all year round; I mean, how mundane would that be?