If there's a wind charging in from the west bearing large chunks of Jamaica in its teeth, if there are mountainous seas like a herd of migrating Pyrenees washing over our western approaches, if there are snows gathering in our northern skies as vast as the vast Antarctic, if rain-clouds enough to cover the country in a bleak Baltic of muddy water are overhead, if frosts are poised to freeze that water into a mini-Alaska, then it's time for the loonies of Ireland to venture into the wild white yonder.
When the blizzards sweep in from the Greenland Banks, some trigger in the brain of a certain trawler skipper is pressed, and he decides to go fishing for sprat off Co Mayo with a crew of bewildered teenagers from Madrid who up until the moment they stepped in the fishing smack thought sea was what you said to an offer of sex.
Some might credit the teenagers for doing the decent thing in taking a party of disabled children from Seville on the fishing trip, though the wheelchairs were the very devil to get up the gangplank, and their guide-dogs proved something of an encumbrance, especially when that gale force wind blew up from the Bight of Iceland.
Time of crisis
Others might argue that it was at the time of crisis like this that their decision to bring along a few great-grandparents should have been an advantage, because of the wisdom conferred by the passing years. But most of the great grandparents were so seasick that they were beyond conversation of any kind; and unkinder critics have argued that their Zimmer frames should have been left ashore. No matter. There they were, the kids in the wheelchairs, the guide-dogs howling for the land, the pensioners and their frames aloft in the rigging, the blind infant from Cadiz in the crows' nest keeping a lookout, and the skipper bawling instruction to the deaf mute from Benidorm at the wheel, even as a hurricane hit them nor' nor' east of Malin Head.
When the call from that fishing vessel came through, the people at the air-sea rescue headquarters at Shannon were just that moment back from hauling in the last of the 230 windsurfers from the Nudist Nun Club, who take to the boards each winter at the first sign of snow in the hope that one of their number will be the first nude, windsurfing nun to make it to Newfoundland in a blizzard. There is always fierce competition between the Lesser Sisters of The Utterly Impoverished and their breakaway order, the Even Lesser Sisters of the Completely and Utterly Stony Broke, and the latest and most extreme splinter faction, The Sisters Who Are Least of All and Would You Have A Couple of Coppers for a Cup of Tea, Sir - who are so poor that they use abandoned beermats as surfboards.
Inishbofin
Their impoverished condition does not mean they lack ambition. However, none of these dogged, naked sisters has as yet made it anywhere near the north American shore - though one of them actually got so far as Inishbofin before foundering and requiring the assistance of the Sikorsky. By then the inside of the Shannon rescue helicopter resembled the refrigerator room of an abattoir, and was quite festooned with the dangling carcasses of frozen nunnery, while volunteer priests hosed them down with heated holy water and gave them the kiss of life through truck-tyre inner tubes.
If it's blizzard time, than it must also be time for the Kingstown Presbyterian Knitting and Sewing Circle to go on its annual hike over the Wicklow mountains, led by the indomitable Major Mawhinnie, MBE, Royal Army Pay Corps, Ret'd. The Major is not quite the man he was when he manfully minded the rations at Ladysmith with a drawn revolver and matchless resolve, even while the garrison was down to its last grilled cockroach and the drummer boys were drawing lots as to who should be put on the menu next (though fortunately it didn't come to that).
Though the years have taken their toll, his sister Prudence is nonetheless always eager to bear her part of the burden, and she is normally the heart and the soul of party. Crumbs, how they laugh as they set from Enniskerry each year, Prudence in the fore as she reminisces about her first girl guide camp under Lady Baden Powell in 1912, the mounting snowstorm and the biting wind only adding to everyone's sense of the occasion. Prudence normally takes with her a supply of large sticks, with which she marks the places where stragglers have collapsed for rescue parties to come and dig them out.
And each year with pride she points out the cairn near Sally Gap which marks the spot where Primrose Entwhistle, stranded, alone and perfectly starving, back in the winter of 1978, killed and consumed a party of the newly founded Buddist Boy Scouts of Ireland, who were attempting the still unconquered Irish Times challenge of walking blindfold from Bray to Ballymore Eustace without shoes in midwinter.
Straggling bands
Yes, the Army Air Corps are delighted to hear of the annual jaunt from Kingstown, and are able to trace the straggling bands of survivors by sticking an ear out of the helicopter door and listening for the fading chords of Keep the Homes Fire Burning. But of course that is not the helicopter crews' only duty, because at this time of year the New Reformed (Orthodox-Zion) Synagogue of Kinnegad has its annual ecumenical pilgrimage on the Blue Stacks, on which it embarks only when the temperature is 10 below freezing and the rabbi's mother Rebecca has a recurrence of the arthritis which she has borne with heroic forbearance.
She is - along with her Primus stove and saucepan of chicken soup - accordingly carried aloft on the shoulders of Moshe, a small hill-farmer from near Moate, through the rising banks of snow, until she too is winched off by a helicopter, which by now is rapidly filling.
But enough of this! The snow falls; the wind blows; it must be time for my annual pole-vault up Carrauntoohil in the nude. Chopper ahoy.