Heatwaves always take the entire Irish population by complete surprise! I mean, we’d consider a good day to be one that involves, at most, 15 minutes of sustained sunshine before it fucks back behind grey clouds and proceeds to piss on us for the rest of the day. Although in these past few days, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Ireland was undergoing an accelerated process of continental drift and was now located somewhere beside Africa.

So with the sun shining down on us, we excitedly root around in our wardrobes for that pair of shorts that we all know is there somewhere. We then look for the suncream that we’ve probably had in the house since 1996, although trying to get anything out of the bottle sounds like some unfortunate soul whose just had a curry that’s been spiked with industrial strength laxatives!

We then feel as if we’re ready to strut our stuff and show our faces in public, complete with the Factor 50 still very visible on our noses! Sure we need factor 50… and lots of it, otherwise the mere talk of sunshine would be enough to bring out the freckles in us. Not only are we proudly showing off our white noses, but we all brandish legs that look more like milk bottles than limbs. All our foreign friends may be sniggering at us but we can at the very least boast that it takes us less time to get dressed in the morning as they’re still wearing about 17 layers of clothes!

The question of what we can do in this glorious weather soon pops up. After all, Ireland isn’t exactly known for its vast array of sunshine activities. This does make it relatively easy for us to make up our mind though and soon enough half the country is flocking to the nearest beach with plastic bags full of beer and snacks – everything we could possibly need to enjoy the day (and what’s left of our suncream of course!). We might be at the beach, but there isn’t a hope in hell that we’ll be going swimming. Oh no, no, no. Swimming is only meant to be done in temperature controlled pools that are laced with chlorine. Although in fairness, swimming in the Irish sea isn’t all that pleasant as there’s this ever-present fear that you’ll swallow some nuclear waste from Sellafield or at the very least get a mouthful of sewage that was just released from that well thought out drain that’s placed at the end of the strand.

The next morning we wake up at like 7am because it’s so fucking bright in the room. By some kind of miracle, the sun is still shining! Never in a million years would we have entertained the suggestion of the possibility of two days of sunshine. We’re not prepared though. We look onto the floor and we can make out the sweat patches on our only pair of shorts from across the room. A trip into the shops is on the cards after it becomes all too apparent that we don’t even have enough suncream left to protect our beloved noses! Of course shopping for suncream is pretty much alien to us. We know we can buy it in Boots because we’ve seen ad’s for it on British Television, but we don’t have a clue where exactly it is. So we carefully walk around the nearest store, going down every aisle and meticulously look at everything to be sure you don’t miss it. After a while you notice not the suncream, but the weird looks you’re getting from the old women around you. You’re a bit miffed at first but soon realise that you’ve accidently wandered down the Pregnancy test aisle.

It’s only after you leave the store having found and paid an extortionate amount of money for the suncream that you start to wonder what the fuck were 60 year olds doing down the Pregnancy Test aisles!

Once again we go to the beach, because after all there’s fuck all else to do. Actually, let me rephrase that. There’s fuck all else you can justify doing. You can justify playing the Xbox for the better part of the day when it’s pissing raining outside, but it’s harder to convince yourself that you’re making the best use of your time doing that when the sun is splitting the rocks.

This time when we get to the beach, all of our jaws drop. The beach is in a state. Instead of treading on sand, we’re tripping over beer cans! Immediately we call the radio stations and complain. “Why can’t the City Council clean all this up?” we all wonder. We point out that when we last went to the beach it was perfectly clean. We fail to mention that we last went to the beach a year a go and even then we left behind all of our rubbish. It wasn’t Liam in the luminous green City Council jacket that cleaned up our mess on that occasion though, it was the ocean.

Heatwaves. In Africa they kill people. In Ireland they just make us realise that we’re filthy animals who expect someone else to clean our mess.