I don't know about you, but the endless rain is causing me to have hallucinations, Frank McNallywrites.
In recent days, I have started hearing advertisements on the radio in which Dublin City Council warns that if we don't conserve water, we may soon have to share baths. I have also begun to see billboard ads around town urging me not to hose the lawn.
The hallucinations are worryingly realistic, because they even refer to a website, www.taptips.ie, which is full of advice on how to cope with a prolonged dry spell.
It says, for example, that mulching the garden can reduce evaporation by 70 per cent. In a more general vein, it also suggests planting flowers that like "warm and dry conditions". And that's when I know I'm imagining the whole thing - because why would you plant dry-weather flowers when you live in Ireland? It would be different if you lived in, say, Australia. In fact, during a break in the hallucinations this week, my mind went back to a time when I really did live there, some years ago, and in particular to a week I spent staying with friends on a sheep station in rural Victoria.
It was during the first week of January - the very height of the Australian summer - and the countryside was like tinder. In common with all farmers in the area, my host was a reserve fire-fighter. On days when the risk of bush-fires was deemed high, he would be obliged to stay close to home, lest he be needed. But one day the conditions relented sufficiently that we were able to make a day-trip to a local beauty spot, the Grampians National Park; and so doing we passed through an old gold-mining town called Ararat.
As you may remember from the Bible, the original Ararat was the mountain on which Noah's Ark came to rest. The town we passed through had been named after it by a surveyor who imagined some likeness. But no less than the Irish place-names dotted all around Victoria, the Great Flood seemed a fanciful idea in the searing heat.
I was reminded of my Australian trip by reports suggesting that country's epic drought may at last be over. Droughts are commonplace there. But the one Australians hope is now ending is agreed to have been the worst for at least a hundred years. Some scientists went further, calling it a "one-in-a-thousand years" phenomenon, which made it sound like a biblical event.
At any rate, Australia's experience reminds us that water is indeed "precious", as the website in my hallucinations claimed. It's just that if Dublin City Council were to launch a real conservation campaign, it would hardly choose to do so now, when - if you attempted to mulch your lawn - you might still drown in it. That's why I know I imagined the whole thing. The council wouldn't mock us like that, and us so already depressed about the weather.
For me, the lowest moment yet of this sodden summer happened recently in Cobh railway station. The station adjoins the deep-sea pier where the big cruise liners come in. So as I waited for my train, I could see the passengers returning in tent-sized raincoats from their trips to Blarney or Cork city, and having their passes checked by the purser before they reboarded.
In fact I had met a few earlier as we sheltered in a Cobh doorway, and I apologised to them for the weather - the way you do - as if it was my fault. They just laughed. After all, they knew they were getting a ship out of here.
But now, as I watched them board the vast liner, something in me snapped. It suddenly occurred to me that the ship must be about 300 cubits long, and 50 cubits high. Also, I couldn't help noticing that the passengers were boarding in twos. Then there was the purser who, since I first noticed him, had developed a flowing beard and appeared to be 600 years old.
Yet he was paying close attention to the passenger list which, it was now clear, represented creatures of all shapes and sizes, clean and unclean, including beasts and fowls and, yea, everything that creepeth upon the earth.
I realised with a panic that this was in fact the Ark, and that it would leave without me if I didn't act quickly. So I ran across the train track, shinned the fence, and moments later was pleading with Noah to take me with him. He was initially reluctant, pointing out that I appeared to be one of a kind and that the rules stipulated a minimum of two. But I slipped him a few quid and, when he looked the other way, I scampered aboard.
Well, to cut a long story short, the flood was 40 days upon the earth, prevailing 15 cubits upward so that even the mountains were covered. And the Ark was lifted upon the waters and sailed for seven months, till at last it came to rest upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters receded. And finally it came to pass that Noah opened the window of the Ark and sent forth from it a raven and a dove.
And lo, the dove returned at length, carrying in its beak a leaf of paper apparently torn from the corner of a bus shelter advertisement and bearing the message "www.taptips.ie". And Noah knew then that the waters must have abated from the earth.
Whereupon he spake unto me, and told me to go forth; because, as he put it, the train to Cork was now leaving from Platform One.