We long for sunshine but weÕre still happiest in the rain

Date Published: {J}

It’s amazing the things that can make you long for home – and more often than not they’re the things you outwardly claim you want to get away from.

Take our recent family holiday where we went to Turkey at a time of year when the heat tops 40 degrees and you realise that the country got its name because the natives, like the Christmas bird, live in an oven.

On your traditional package holiday, a day spent baking in the sunshine is inevitably followed by a night of cabaret or karaoke – or worse still, Mr and Mrs games involving bananas and balloons.

So as the sun set, the pony-tailed crooner with the guitar began his set with a version of Travis’ Why Does It Always Rain On Me – the chances of which were as remote as Greece sorting out its own debt crisis.

Just for good measure, his second song was Prince’s Purple Rain – and suddenly in the evening heat of Kusadasi, you were like the fella in the old Harp Lager ad, dreaming of Sally O’Brien and the way she might look at you…..but more than that, dreaming of rain, as you relaxed in a land where you truly could fry an egg on the rocks.

The reality is that, no matter how far we fly to see the sunshine, Irish people are made for the rain; despite the proliferation of tanning shops, we’re meant to look pasty or pink. And we’re meant to wear coats and sweaters.

We love the notion of sunshine, the joy of the rays on our back – but after two days of it, we’re salivating for the feel of the mist on our faces, the wind in what’s left of our hair, and the chance to wrap up well against the elements.

And that’s why our Kusadasi crooner sung about the rain when the rest of us were recovering from sunstroke – because he knew that, despite spending four hours to fly to the heat, what we really wanted was a light fall of rain.

And lest it be said that this is just about sweating in the sun, we’re equally thrown out of stride by snow – a light fall of it and we look like we’re reeling from an alien invasion. We cannot drive faster than ten miles an hour, and we can only walk if there are telegraph poles to cling to along the path.

People have to take days off work because they are house-bound by virtue of the two inches of icy snow on the doorstep. Pipes burst, attics flood, ankles break, cars won’t move – and the Taoiseach nominates a member of Cabinet to deal with the snow crisis.

These aren’t even weather extremes – that’s what you get when you see those television pictures of a hurricane off Miami or flooding in Thailand – but anything that moves more than five degrees from our seasonal norm is too much to handle.

The truth is that, while we yearn summer for sunshine or long for a White Christmas, we’re happiest on a grand, soft day when we’re dodging the drops and looking forward to savouring a nice pint in front of a pub’s big open fire.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.