SPRING, 2008 has been a strange season, with Easter falling in the same wintry week as St Patrick's Day, followed by a relentless succession of chilly, damp days that rightly seemed to belong to autumn. As March merged into April, the evenings grew longer without getting any warmer; and now we stand, supposedly on the doorstep of summer, with winter still breathing down our necks.
The call of the cuckoo was duly reported in a letter to this page last week, the swallows have arrived, and the GAA championships are about to begin. But while we have had a fair ration of sunshine in recent weeks, raw winds have made it weather for scurrying, not strolling, in country road, suburb or city street. Farmers and gardeners report slow or stunted growth; on the plus side, there has been little need to mow the grass or pull those "weeds, in wheels, [ that] shoot long and lovely and lush".
In reality, of course, May has never really been a summer month, any more than February truly belongs to spring. Perhaps Shakespeare, with his inimitable eloquence, is partly responsible for the fiction. "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" he wrote in a famous sonnet. "Thou are more lovely and more temperate. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. . ." One suspects that the Bard, with his customary poetic licence, simply reached for "May" as a handy rhyme for "day". But note the mention of "rough winds"; and another note of realism in the following line reminds us that "summer's lease hath all too short a date".
In Shakespeare's time, admittedly, May - and summer generally - may well have been warmer than today. Certainly, a more recent era - the late 19th and early 20th centuries was markedly warm and dry. And people of mature years who recall the glowing summers of their youth are not simply being hazed by nostalgia. Writing more than 20 years ago in The Book of the Irish Countryside, the meteorologist Thomas Keane observed: "Since the 1950s. . .the climate has tended to become cooler, wetter and duller. In particular there has been a tendency for cooler springs and summers".
Such cold, scientific facts are of little cheer to those longing for a sunny spell to warm the blood and the bones. And the memory of last year's miserable summer is too fresh to let us face the prospect of a repeat with any vestige of equanimity. Yet the very unpredictability that makes Irish weather so frustrating can also be a source of hope. The "merry month" of May has arrived without much promise, but it might yet deliver.