Indo col 62 in which I engage in further pre-apocalypse musing.
If this recent spell of incredible weather has taught us anything, it is that there’s nothing wrong with a little rain. Two weeks of blistering heat was all that was needed to turn our forty shades of green into many shades of yellow, umber and brown. The upside is that you don’t have to mow your lawn, now that it looks like it has been napalmed, but the downside is that crops aren’t doing so well. Over the past eight months we have had the worst storm in decades in Ophelia, the worst snow in decades in The Beast From The East, and now this blisteringly hot weather for which we are meant to be thankful, rather than concerned.
After the first few days out at the beach, and after you’ve spent half your food budget on factor 50, which you have slathered on so thick that your family looks like a Kabuki theatre troupe, the sun gets pretty irritating. Even at night we have fans running, windows open, and a swarm of associated bugs coming in and bothering us in our fretful, fevered sleep. And now, on top of everything, there is going to be a hosepipe ban, which will plunge the heatwave-plagued suburbs into a Cold War; neighbours spying on neighbours from behind lace curtains, old scores over garden boundaries being settled by calling in the water police, senior citizens being dragged away in black vans for using an illicit watering can to try and hydrate their hydrangeas – in this bleak dystopia, water is the supreme commodity. How long then, until we see water dealers popping up on street corners, selling bottles of Evian out of a gearbag at 50 euro a pop? How long until they start stepping on the product by cutting it with water from the Grand Canal? When you ask them what all the green stuff is in the bottle, they just shrug and tell you it’s ‘vitamins’, when it’s actually pond scum. How long until Ireland becomes a bit like Mad Max if it was set in a disused waterpark? A while, probably. But we could still do with some rain, sooner rather than later.
The sun has brought out some strange creatures – bright red, bloated, waddling around on the sand on their shapely cankles. I speak of course of the humble sea toad, a species not native to our waters, but who obviously heard about the looming water shortage and thought he would come closer to shore to laugh at us from his watery home. Well the joke’s on him, as he ended up being caught off the Kerry coast by the Cú Na Mara trawler on the Porcupine Bank, a place that one would expect to find porcupine fish, but sadly no, just the comedic blob that is the sea toad.
The sea toad is something of a celebrity, having appeared in Blue Planet II due to the odd fact that it has legs that it uses to crawl along the seabed. Obviously after his 15 minutes of watery fame he now thinks he is able to saunter into Irish waters and possibly even onto land, where he would blend in with various other bright red globulous lifeforms swarming our beaches for the last week. Soon he would be stealing Fungi’s job as Ireland’s ambassador to the oceans, strutting around Dingle demanding free pints (I hear he he drinks like a fish), then he runs in the local elections, and as long as he fixes a few roads using Atlantean sub-contractors, he would be right in. I say this madness must stop now, and we need to build a sea wall around Irish waters, burn effigies of Toadfish Rebecchi from Neighbours along the coast, and send the message that if we can’t eat you with a side of new potatoes, then you are not welcome in our waters, no matter the weather.