This past week has seen Ireland bathed in glorious, stone splitting sunshine. Across the country from Ballymun to Bandon, the ubiquitously Irish debate that revolves around “Sure isn’t the weather grand altogether?” has heated up to a balmy twenty or so degrees, as the mercury in barometers in every Irish hallway scaled new and previously unassailable heights. Once again, we have this year’s crop of Leaving Certers to thank for this weather eventuality: for as certain as death, taxes, night and day is the fact that those end of year exams bring with them fantasmigorical weather conditions.
“Oh”, we lament, for 350 days in the year, “If only we could have some sunshine”. The truth is that when that miraculous live-giving ball of heat decides to make itself known in this rocky outcrop, we tend to be fabulously unprepared for it. As Irish people, we do not look well in sun. Shaft of light and heat, much like the moon in Pirates of the Caribbean, show us for what we really are, and the picture is fairly bleak. Having watched James Franco prance around a swimming pool in slow motion in the searing LA heat for his latest TV eau-de-awful commercial, every Irish male develops a certain misplaced arrogance that we too can strip down to some ill-fitting shorts from three years ago, and display ourselves to the world. We can’t. We are not Jamie-F. Thus, though the hirsute look might have been left behind in 1982, biology has some catching up to do with fashion. No amount of preening, pruning or general manscaping can prevent Irish males treating each other to an eyeful of what lies beneath when the sun comes out to play. Charming.
So despite best advice and/or common decency, the merest squeak of sunlight is enough to have a wide and varied assortment of people young and old dispense with their clothing in worship. Here, we have some differences between the genders. If you’re female, you’ll likely ditch your winter-issue scarf large enough to have been given to you for training purposes by the SAS Parachute Regiment in favour of some garment formed from what could charitably be termed well-placed dental floss, and an oversized pair of sunglasses that you bought in Penny’s for a fiver. If you’re male, dental floss isn’t even a requirement, as t-shirts give way to…well…nothing at all, and the bare midriff becomes a staple wardrobe accessory for every twenty-something nipping out the shops for a few beers and a Cornetto.
Some facets of the good weather unite the masses though. Irish conversations will remain stubbornly on-topic, as thoughts are voiced on the subject of this newfound thing in the sky. “Christ”, we say, slightly breathless, with a light sheen of sweat across the brow, “its very warm out there. I can’t take much of it”. Idioms about only being able to please some of the people, some of the time, have never seemed more apt.
Sun cream is another commonality. Sun cream is a little like that game you used to play as a kid, where you had to thread the hoop along a metal wire, or set off the alarm and lose the game if you touched one off the other – it’s simple in principle, but impossible in practice. Deciding to safely dispense with one’s shirt, men and women will liberally apply a thin veneer of creamy lotion (probably intermingled with the exfoliating properties of half the beach they’ve just arrived on) in an effort to combat the 5,500°C heat and the onset of melanoma.
As a substance, sun cream poses all sorts of problems. No one short of an Olympic gymnast can apply it to their own entire body, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t try, contorting yourself into hitherto unfathomable positions in an effort to reach that mid portion of your back, with no success. This means that you must call someone for help, offering your chosen victim a front-row view of your colourless Irish bod. If your male, sun cream will latch on to your already-discussed furry frame and glue the lot into an unpleasant wad, while if you’re male and balding, you must then apply sun cream to your scalp lest you spend the following week looking like a traffic light each and every time you look down. Still, sun cream applied and dusty summer furniture reassembled, you can then look forward to an afternoon spent reading a good book, which, seconds after you pick it up, will be smudged with sun cream. You’ll also have to brush up you aim, as sun cream bizarrely attracts flies like no substance known to man. Perhaps you’d like a cooling, refreshing drink? That’ll taste of sun cream too. At the end of the day, you’ll retreat indoor, to compare the pink patches you’ve obtained during the day, and apply still more potions to assuage the fiery, itchy hell all over your corpus.
I don’t mean to sound like a curmudgeon. I’m enjoying the good weather as much as the next man or woman, whether dressed or dressed in the Emperor’s New Clothes. Irish people just aren’t built for it though. As Baz Luhrman put it, “Everyone’s Free To Wear Sunscreen”. Of course we should, but you must do it, spare a thought for the rest of us first.
