My nine-year-old pointed upwards to the sky last week and asked me what that strange, dark object was hanging about above St Eunan’s Cathedral in Letterkenny.
I told her it was one of those things from the “olden days” as she so often refers to items or traditions from yesteryear.
Things like landline phones, fax machines, milk bottles and video recorders.
The unusual object she had spotted through the car window was a thing called a raincloud.
It’s difficult to believe now that they were all so common back in Donegal in the day.
In fact, I’m pretty sure that Donegal was at the forefront of raincloud production across Ireland right up until about April of this year.
The sudden disappearance of the one-time hugely-popular commodity has generally been welcomed from Bundoran to Buncrana.
It appears that the prolonged lack of rainclouds accompanied by a spike in temperatures has made people realise we can actually be happy.
We can forget about the fact that we have mortgages that will take years to pay off.
We can momentarily forget about the fact that we may have to wait two years to see a hospital consultant if we stub our toe or happen to have a chronic heart condition.
And we can almost forget about the fact that we are paying hundreds of euro each year to tax our ten year old cars for the honour of being able to swerve between potholes on the shortest of journeys.
Because it’s amazing what putting a pair of shorts and a t-shirt will do for your demeanor.
Take a poll in your place of work, be it a café, building site or office and ask your workmates if they feel better when that big yellow thing is high in the sky.
Chances are the majority of those will say yes.
Yes, the chronic water shortages is bad news for our farmers but surely the fact that we are wasting at least 40% of our supply through leakage may be the answer sifting through the cracks?
But there is one very large raincloud on the horizon.
Last night Met Eireann said their medium range forecast allowed them to forecast for up to ten days and that the weather patterns showed more of the same and none of the rain.
So this is the problem. Are we ready for the day when we do pull back our curtains and see a return to the cold and the rain and the wind we normally associate with our summer months?
I’m getting depressed thinking about it already.
Like the housing market we need a soft landing – a gradual decline back into our cooler days without the sight of dads setting fire to barbeques and raw-red foreheads.
Take it from me the day we wake up and the sunshine is gone, there’s going to be a lot of depressed people about.
Get out and make the most of it.
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