Tá sé ag cur báisteach
A regret I carry is the fact that I lost most of the Irish language I learned (or was supposed to learn!) in school. This defect bothers me when I meet my gaeilgeori friends. It was only late in life that I came to appreciate the beauty of our own language. There is no excuse for me not having made the effort to refresh my native tongue in adult life, but with my memory retention now resembling that of a goldfish, I have regretfully given up on the idea.
The strangest thing is that sometimes when I struggle to find a Spanish word, the Irish word, buried somewhere inside me for 70 years will surface to the top instead.
One sentence from Johnstown School which I never forgot, because I repeated it so often is; Ta se ag cur baisteach… ‘it is raining’. Cad é an aimsir inniu?… ‘how is the weather today’, was the ceist that invited that answer.
Another thing that stuck in my head from Johnstown school was the story of Noah and his Ark. The line I want to pluck out here from the story is where a red rain warning reports rain for ’40 days and 40 nights’ in Noah’s neck of the woods. Is that all, I ask you? It has been raining here since Christmas – the 40 days and 40 nights, apart from the odd ‘brightening’ to heavy showers. The tops of the mountains haven’t yet been covered, as in Noah’s predicament, but as I heard a woman remark in a shop yesterday; ‘wouldn’t you just be sick of it!’.
I look out my window now as it is coming down in ropes of rain… and I’m just sick f it.
I came home from Spain at the weekend. I took Mrs Youcantbeserious out there for a bit of sun a couple of weeks back. She loves the sun. Anyway, it was raining when we left here and it was raining when we got there. I just stayed a week and left the wife behind in the hope that the weather had to take up. It is still raining on Mrs Youcantbeserious in Spain and it is raining here since I got home.
That woman in the shop was right; ‘wouldn’t you just be sick of it!’.
I can just imagine how dairy farmers feel now with cows ready to go out and the fields of good grass resembling paddy fields. It is possible, I suppose, that the weather may clear before this goes to print. We have short memories where the weather is concerned and you may well all be wondering what he was on about!
But what if the weather doesn’t change? There have been so many certainties in our lives that are no more; can we be certain the rain will ever clear? You might be forgiven for thinking that the great weatherman up there in the sky got his dial stuck on ‘give them more rain’.
Was Noah’s deluge a biblical punishment? I can’t remember – but that certainly feels like what we are being punished with now. We like to talk about how changeable the weather is in this country; but it hasn’t changed for a long time and is there really any guarantee that it will? The ’40 days and 40 nights’ of persistent rain has affected building work, sports, travel, and will soon clobber farmers. Homes have been destroyed, businesses flooded, rivers annexing land and severe coastal erosion a very worrying phenomenon. Dublin is on a list of 36 cities worldwide that face the earliest threat from rising sea levels. As a man who was reared in the bog, I’m so grateful to have found high ground here in Irishtown!
The old order is gone with regard to economics, national relationships and even democracy itself. The most powerful country in the world now claims that climate change is all a cod and ‘the monk’ sees himself in government… so don’t bank on this rain clearing or anything ever being normal again!
Meteorologists and those who give out weather forecasts are being given a hard time at the moment because there is a tendency in most of us that any misfortune always has to be someone else’s fault. An act of God is an act of God and all we can do is protect ourselves as well as we can and react in the best way we know how when it goes against us.
Precipitation… now there’s a word I never gave any thoughts to until a short time back. Apparently the word covers anything that can fall from the sky and wet us in the process. It can be slight drizzle, rain, sleet, snow-ice, hailstones and heavy mist.
Again, we have to say that woman in the shop had it nailed it to a T; ‘wouldn’t you just be sick of it!’.
Don’t Forget
Science can predict an eclipse of the sun many years in advance, but cannot accurately predict the weather over the weekend.