Vice President AL Gore of the US, an ageing greenie, has been telling a broiling nation just how hot it is. As Joe Carroll reported last week, Gore's statistics showed that June 1998, on average worldwide, was the hottest June in more than a century of meteorological records. The world, he told the American people, is getting hotter and hotter.
Are we on the same planet? As one often wonders when hearing an American talk. Somewhere, running down longitudinally from Greenland, there is a line dividing the world, and half of them are on the Hot Side while we in Ireland are very much out in the Cold.
The Brits have been making a lot more fuss about this lousy summer than stalwarts on this side of the Irish Sea. Every time you turn on the BBC news they are whimpering in the studio, or showing footage of those stout-hearted English seafronters buttoned up in their plastic macs admitting to the camera as they survey sheeting rain at Brighton: "The main problem is resisting the temptation to stay indoors."
Even the peas are depressed, wailed the London Independent last week The English crop is down 25 per cent on the usual yield.
Stronger stuff
Here the natives, if not the vegetables, are made of stronger stuff, strong enough to cope with the fact that Sydney, in the middle of its winter, has temperatures around 15 deg C. Sound familiar? Summer temperatures here.
Seasonally Affected Disorder, or SAD, has many of us in its grip. This condition is gaining academic respectability, although doctors are likely to remain sceptical. "And what will I write on this certificate of illness for your employer?" "Doctor, every time I sit on a deckchair in my backyard it rains. Tell the boss I'm very SAD." Yes, and he's Barney the Dinosaur.
Summer in Ireland is, usually, an oxymoron. We had a wonderful summer in 1995 and with a bit of luck there will be another one like that in 2015 (every 20 years being one of the more optimistic assessments of when this temperate island can expect such warmth again). So I am perplexed at the short memories of people who say with genuine anguish in their eyes and voices, "This is terrible. Oh this is awful. It's so unusual." Don't they remember last year?
And is it really worth going out and buying shorts or sleeveless dresses? That is, without a matching goose-feather lined anorak? Personal experience of six summers here suggests that one way to condemn your neighbours to a succession of soft days and temperatures hovering in the low teens is to invest rashly in a pair of stringy sandals or a frothy white dress suitable for Seville or Marrakech. Remember the beautiful burst of sunny weather in May? Glorious, wasn't it? Until I bought a beige suede-look (Nubuk, I think it is called) handbag to go with all the summer dresses (elderly ones from the 1980s) I was so looking forward to wearing. Since then the weather has been definitely the black handbag variety.
Lyrical memory
I can't afford to be that sniffy about the weather because I come from Melbourne, mainland Australia's southernmost capital, and some readers will have been there and know that the lyrical memory of endless days bathed in 80 degree sunshine, drinking chilled wine and sniffing the aroma of the barbecue in the balmy twilight, is not an accurate picture of every summer. There are plenty of days in December and January (supposed high points of the southern hemisphere summer) when the temperature suddenly plunges 20 degrees and can stay there for a week. Several southern summers ago, a first-time visitor to Australia was amazed to find that the searing 36 degree heat of a Monday in December changed within minutes to an icy superstorm with hailstones as big as tennis balls.
But, generally, Australians know that they will get a real summer every year. For northerners up around Cairns and Brisbane, it is serious tropical heat, with accompanying monsoon conditions for a time; over in the West, it is dry, often around 40 deg Fahrenheit; in the more southerly capitals of Adelaide, Melbourne and the national capital, Canberra, temperatures are likely to be a very pleasant average of the high seventies or eighties.
The summer of 1996-97 was a particular scorcher, as anybody who watched the Australian Open tennis competition on television will know - the demand for electricity to power fans and air conditioners and fridges blew the system, brought Melbourne to a halt and plunged the venue, the National Tennis Centre, into Stygian darkness.
Dry Aussie wit
When I was a kid, summer meant mass picnics at some of the better, further-away beaches, in tandem with various of my parents' friends and their families. The men would always be full of wisecracks, with their dry Aussie wit, leading me to wonder why men were so much funnier than women.
With hindsight I can see that it might have been more conducive to humour to be lolling around in your towelling hat with a "stubbie" (small squat bottle) of Fosters than to be fighting flies, blowaway tablecloths, un-openable tins of Camp Pie (Australian Spam) and squadrons of kids whining "When can I go swimming, Mum?" All things considered, the women kept their moods marvellously.
A feature of these picnics was usually my nosebleed. Hot weather seemed to bring it on. One scorching day we drove for hours to Cape Schank, right on the southernmost tip of the state of Victoria, to meet a skinny Irish priest, Father Bernard Geoghegan, who had baptised me some years before. The heat, the drive, the skeletal appearance of Father G on the cliff top, all combined to bring on the mother of all nose bleeds, and I spent the day submerged in the sea up to my neck, going through torn-up sheets (which went with me everywhere as emergency hankies in summer) at a great rate.
Come to think of it, the soft Irish summer isn't so bad.