Summer this year wasn't all that bad now, was it? All of St Patrick's Day, plus, as an unexpected bonus, much of the first day of June. Nineteen ninety nine; the year of the binary summer, and one to talk about for years to come until we are garrotted in our bathchairs by grandchildren who would rather go to the gallows than hear another word about the unspeakable weather during the last year of the second millennium. (No, please, please, nitpickers, I know full well that numerologically speaking the millennium ends on December 31st, 2000).
Having bad summers wouldn't be such an awful thing if we lived somewhere else, far away from other people's weather systems and their met offices. But we do not. We live next door to the British, who in addition to having dramatically better weather than ours, also - and rather thoughtlessly, I must say - speak the same language as we do. Why can't they go off and invent a language of their own for once?
Finnish forecasts
The problem about living beside such people who (a) who speak your language, albeit in a somewhat pidgin form and (b) have better weather than you have, is that there is no escaping news of what a good meteorological time they're having of it. It would be different if we lived off the Gulf of Bothnia, alongside the Finns, because then we wouldn't have the least idea of what the weather was like in Helsinki. We could tune into their weather forecasts and learn that it was jyvaskanninenn salissa aukkipudas nakummut telnakkaa, but moving from the north was a salmininnuen salissa morkkuunut which might bring some taistellekkenn sannomat ukkuu.
No complaints about that now, are there? One could grin idiotically through the lot, and not know whether the Finns were going to be up to their gills in a new Ice Age or whether the population of Helsinki were about to be neatly fried a bon point and served with onions, with maybe a light green salad on the side. But we do not inhabit the gulf of Bothnia. We live this side of St George's Channel, and viewing British television, as most of us do, we can hardly miss weather forecasts for the south-east of England, not least because the BBC conducts a kind of terrorist met-war against its Irish viewers.
Halfway through A Midsummer Night's Dream from Stratford last week, for example, Quince, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Starveling and Puck were declaiming, "What hempen homespuns have we swagg'ring here, So near the cradle of the Fairy Queen," when one of them departed from the supplied script to announce in jeering BBC-ese that it had been another scorching day in London, with temperatures in the high eighties, and at Lords England had been saved from a nine-wicket defeat by the Tibetan Wheelchair Eleven when sun stopped play.
Bottom's song
"What?" we shrieked, reeling. Yet then the play proceeded as per usual, as if we had suffered from an insane but passing hallucination - for now Bottom as singing, "The ousel cock, so black of hue, With orangetawny bill, The throstle with his note so true, The wren with little quill." Back to the original, and we all exchanged the relieved looks of a couple of missionaries, in the pot with the fire lit, who have just seen a troop of Poor Clares, bayonets fixed, goose-stepping into the village.
So we were enjoying Shakespeare as it should be, with Titania replying, "I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again. Mine ear is much enamoured of thy note. And on the south coast of England, resorts have reported their warmest, loveliest day this century, with bumper crowds enjoying perfect sea-bathing. Phew, what a scorcher!"
Let us be clear about this. Deliberate torment of this kind has been adjudged by the European Court of Human Rights to constitute cruel and degrading treatment, and we thought the Brits had agreed to desist from it. All right, strictly speaking, it's not mentioned in the Good Friday Agreement, but it is there in spirit if not in the letter. We in Ireland - and we are united on this, if nothing else - voted so massively in favour of that agreement because we were absolutely sure we were voting for no more triumphalist weather forecasts from southeast England.
Decommissioning
Did we get decommissioning of British weather forecasts which disingenuously declare that there were grave fears about the pineapple crop in Surrey ripening too early? Did we get an orderly surrender of met reports about the hot weather in Norfolk being good news for the orange-groves there? Did we get any respite from the diet of yodelling and odious meteorological glee?
We got none of these things. Worse, we have had declarations about the superiority of British weather in the middle of cookery programmes, during the tensest moments of a snooker final, and even, at 6 a.m. one Sunday morning, in the middle of Urdu for Begin- ners. What has made the violation of the Stormont Agreement even more unendurable is that these terrorist thrusts usually occur just, as back here in Ireland, the Slieve Blooms are sliding under the rising waters of the Shannon like a whale which has just scented a family of his favourite brand of plankton, scuba-diving 100 feet below.
A warning, weather forecasters of Britain: Gloat once more, and you'll get war.