We Irish are gas when it comes to the weather. As soon as there’s a bit of it about we lose the run of ourselves.
Take the recent dry and sunny period. The sun came out on June 17th and we had a beautiful week of sunshine. It really lifted spirits. The usual things happened. The Irish Times HR department sent around ice creams to keep us cool. At the weekend it seemed like everybody was buying bedding plants and watering cans. Aldi and Lidl suddenly had garden furniture and sunglasses on special, and Irish Rail finally found the air-conditioning button in the trains. Some pasty Irishmen stripped off and sat at the front of their houses with bags of cans. Others drove their drop-top Peugeot 206s around even though they didn't need to go anywhere.
Meanwhile up in the capital groups of young hooligans flung themselves from dangerous and inappropriate heights into the publicly owned waterways of the State in an irresponsible and frankly inconsiderate fashion, while some of the guys over in Portobello showed us all how to let our hair down by tightrope walking across a canal. In the nude. Those guys are just hilarious. Little scamps.
It's the same when it snows. Apart from the usual school closures, working from home and a shortage of grit, there's always some young fella in a tracksuit who has a knack of being able to put stones in his snowballs before throwing them at your four-by-four. Or some other lads who engage in side-splitting tomfoolery involving a shard of ice down the back of a old man's shirt, or a snowball fight on Grafton Street in the early hours of the morning. Epic.
As soon as there is plentifulness we remove the 'stay calm and have some common sense' part of the brain and replace it with the 'woo hoo' part
Of course it's little wonder we are like this. Let's face it, we lose the run of ourselves quite easily in Ireland. As soon as there is plentifulness we remove the "stay calm and have some common sense" part of the brain and replace it with the "woo hoo" part. And, of course, plentifulness comes in many forms. A couple of years ago it was shedloads of snow; last month it was hotter-than-Ibiza temperatures and wall-to-wall sunshine. Since the start of the year the plentifulness is money. On the face of it, at least, there seem to be a lot of people around with a lot of it.
Economists and commentators call it things like a “recovery”, an “adjustment”, “positive consumer sentiment”, a “correction” or sometimes even a “bubble”, although many are saying there is no bubble. Comical Ali eat your heart out. I heard one guy recently say that Brexit could cause anything from a 10 per cent contraction to the economy to 2 per cent growth. Either way, he’s going to be on the right side of Morgan Kelly this time around.
Whatever you call it, though, there's something in the air. Have you not noticed it? When I heard in January that a Dublin cafe was selling algae-infused latte I thought it may have been a one-off. But, no, it's other things. A colleague noted that a box of what looked like tea bags in the newsroom kitchen was in fact a box of hand-stitched silken tea pillows. It is far from hand-stitched silken tea pillows we were born.
Every time I log on to Facebook, Instagram or anything else somebody is posting about their holidays or weekend breaks, and only a few weeks ago a group of young lads were queuing outside a shop in Dublin to spend €188 on a pair of runners. I ask you. But that's not that bad; a few weeks previously people were queuing overnight to buy pretty ordinary-looking houses for about €500,000 each. There's the groups of lads in high-vis, six of them packed into a 15-year-old Volkswagen, hurtling down the M1 at 6am, the bouncy-castle shortages, sourdough-bread shortages, avocado shortages, PCP finance, and restaurants that couldn't possibly take a booking with just two weeks' notice.
It’s back, baby. Maybe it’s not a bubble, but it tastes awfully like one.
Thousands are lumbered with negative equity and banjaxed mortgages, but he'd want to book his smashed-avocado salad before his next trip home
A friend who hasn’t lived here for about 20 years was asking me recently how postrecession Ireland was working out. I tried to explain. Homelessness is at crisis level, and thousands are lumbered with negative equity and banjaxed mortgages, but he’d want to book his smashed-avocado salad before his next trip home.
I had been struggling to come up with a metaphor when the naked lad at the canal popped up on my feed. It’s as if Ireland is tightrope walking naked over murky water, says I. Most people are on the side, cheering us on and saying, “Sure it’ll be grand, keep going”, “This is great craic”, “Tell the health-and-safety guy to take a hike”.
Others are watching from behind the couch because they fell into the canal a few years ago. With luck we will get to the other side and everything will be all right, but there is also a chance we will fall straight into the dirty water.
So far, so good, so far so good.