Irish Eyes: Ireland Is Not Disneyland

Of course the weather in Disneyland is perfect. It goes without saying that the sun shines brilliantly and the rain only falls in a delightful arc from sprinklers on the bright flowers and not on the happy people queuing.

Ireland therefore is not Disneyland.

If the world were a dog Ireland would represent the saliva glands at dinner time. It is not so much a constant drooling but that they merest tinkling of a bell precipitates, well it precipitates precipitation.

Not that anyone complains about the weather as such, or per se. The weather here, rather, is internal, like the saliva glands. It is a weather of the psyche and represents the mental vicissitudes of life on an island on the edge of a great big land mass meeting a ferocious ocean. Tossed about like a fat international financier's salad.

For a start, for the weather to be real here, rather than a psychological state of being, would be altogether too much of an iteration of rural life which simply belongs in another century and a time when neighbouring states went into bloody battles for the ruling classes' evening classes and cross stitch lessons, which were so precious then. Cross stitch lessons have no place anymore, there meaning is confined to the once important embroidered tapestries of nostalgia.

But then again this is all too theoretical to fit into the framework of an occasional discourse on the weather in a country far from New Zealand but across the ocean from the home of Mr Walter Disney (whose memory remains cryogenically stored in the diaspora of our childhoods, hoping to be resurrected by riding a rollercoaster - which represents life's up and downs without the responsibility of being in any control, an idea Ronan Keating has so beautifully set to music).

Then again if you are a believer in everlasting life, as one imagines Ronan is, his final destiny must be an everlasting rollercoaster. Hence the Circle of Life theme song in the Lion King, perhaps, which dealt with issues on a similar level to his hit song.

Why though would anyone say that Europe is a separate and distinct continent when it is so obviously, on a geographical level, connected to Asia? But that is an aside.

Back to the humourous discourse. To enter into the salivation zone is to become a part of the global soup being brewed in a witches cauldron on an open fire in a Manhattan bank (of all places!).

The point is lost and must be found again. Though not in the natural world of raindrops, rather in the much less lively though altogether more alive place that is electronic culture.

Just as one raindrop in nature is indistinguishable from another so too are daily discourses on the weather, laughed at, lauded, scoffed and forgotten. Just as the reason quite why the saliva should start drooling when the bell tinkles is forgotten. The food is wolfed down but the dog is still internally and eternally hungry.

It will rain again tomorrow in Ireland.

Greg Meylan would like to point out that he writes these pieces for Ireland.com and then subverts it to a New Zealand audience and is entirely unclear on the ethics of doing so.

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