brendan ó sé photography

“Let’s head to the beach this weekend”

“Ya, great idea. I could do with a swim.”

Weekend comes and it is a wash out. You just cannot make any plans.

That is what most people complain of when the topic of Irish summers comes up. But it is true – you just cannot plan.

We are into the last month of the summer and it is safe to say it has been one of the least warm in living memory. The mercury has not risen above 20 degrees. Most days it hovers around 14 – 16 degrees. Most days it rains. Most days there is a wind that bites.

I know we have it good in many ways here in Ireland. We are coming out of the worst recession to ever hit this country, but I wonder how many of us would swap Greek weather for their debt. Would the Greeks swap their debt for our weather? I doubt it. They may have crippling austerity, but they have blue skies. Could it be possible for us to invest in research and see if somehow we could just slowly slip our way down to the Portuguese coast? Could it?

What we call summer is passing quickly. Soon the kids will be back in school and the dark winter nights will creep in. Kids love the beach and love the sea. Yesterday morning, I checked the weather on the iPhone and saw that there were semi-cloudy conditions between 2 – 5 p.m and temperatures getting into the high teens. The high teens! Excited about this I suggested to my wife that we head to Inchadonny (a spectacular long beach in West Cork) for a picnic. Within a hour we were parked up and picnicking in the car. It was easier, warmer, and less blustery to have it in the car.

Irish beaches are some of the most beautiful in the world. With our inclement and likely-to-disappoint weather, the beaches are not surrounded by big, high-rise hotels. Fields of green stretch out for as far as the eye can see. What should be crowded beaches full of people enjoying all that a sunny summer’s day can offer are starkly the opposite. So few people. I got chatting to the lifeguard:

“What’s the summer been like? Has it always been this quiet?”

“Today’s busy, boy.” “Some days you might have a handful of people.”

“Ah, sure, they say August might be better.”

“This is August; August the first.”

Anyway, the kids loved the picnic and loved playing in the sand, digging holes and being buried up to their necks in it. We did not brave the water. It looked freezing. We can hope, I suppose, that they promised better weather might come in this month of August. The temperatures might even topple over twenty. We might see blue skies and that damn wind might turn into a breeze.

Looking on the positive, I did manage to get some Shot on iPhone 6 photographs yesterday. Hope you like them.