FAQSIF, as Harold Wilson famously remarked, a week is a long time in politics, 10 years must be a lengthy spell by any measure. It is after all, almost as long as human childhood, a seventh of the normal life span, and a quarter of the usual working life.
It is also, as of yesterday, the length of time that your humble scribe has been producing Weather Eye. It was on August 9th, 1988, that the very first in this series saw the light of day, and it has run in a daily and unbroken sequence ever since. Let me absent myself from matters meteorological awhile, and review a decade past, and contemplate another decade yet to come.
Over the years there has evolved about the column a common set of FAQ, an acronym which computer buffs will quickly recognise as "Frequently Asked Questions". The two most often heard are:
Whence is thy learning? Hath thy toil
O'er books consumed the midnight oil?
The origin of the first - a thin veneer of apparent erudition - can be traced to a youth sans siblings and TV, combined with the blessings of a good parental library. I had the time and opportunity to delve into many of the classics, and the words and contexts sometimes make a ghost-like reappearance from the dim recesses of an ageing memory. I do not carry in my head all the quotations that I use in Weather Eye, but when an apposite allusion flickers in the mind, I often know where I should concentrate a search.
And the midnight oil? There has indeed been much of that since 1988, given (to answer yet another FAQ) that each Weather Eye takes about three hours to write. It typically requires an hour to assemble all the necessary information, another hour to get it on the screen, and a third to make the copy readable and send it on its way.
But the most challenging times, to coin a phrase, have been those of the most recent past. Regular readers may have noted that I moved to Germany a while ago, and for several months your copy was produced on a lap-top computer in a small hotel room, sans books, sans The Irish Times, sans family, sans everything. In any event, the deadlines were observed, in keeping with an American editor's apocryphal demand: "I don't want it good; I want it Tuesday."
And the final FAQ: how long will it continue? As long, I suppose, as health and God and Sir of The Irish Times allow. But my personal toast to Weather Eye last evening was "ad multos annos".