Áilín Quinlan: ‘Revenge, as they say, is a dish that is best served cold’

Wow, I thought, tentatively toeing what was left of the lawn, I’d forgotten what wet grass felt like.

I’d even half-forgotten what green grass looked like because it’s been so brown - and sometimes burned nearly white – for so long.

I’d definitely forgotten what feeling cold is like, and getting caught in a shower of heavy rain definitely came as a bit of a shock.

In fact, I’d become so complacent about this whole French Riviera-in-Ireland summer we’d been having that I’d installed two sets of pretty mosaic-patterned solar lights from Aldi in the incredibly verdant, flourishing, luxuriant, not to say rampant, bed of flowers near the patio.

And, even more incredibly in the context of your average Irish summer evening, instead of pulling on fleeces and leggings and running inside to light the fire long before sunset, we’d been balming out in warm darkness, sipping cold white wine or drinking tea, and gazing at the gently glowing lights without ever feeling the chill of that old grave-digger’s shovel.

I’d been stepping down off the pier and straight into tepid seas without thinking about the heart-stopping cold. In fact, once the jellyfish sloped off to wherever they came from, it was paradise.

Two days before the end of the long, long heatwave – yes I know, technically it didn’t qualify as a two-month heatwave, but as far as I’m concerned that’s what it was – the fans finally arrived from a gigantic online Chinese retailer.

We’d sweated through the peak of the heat, learning to keep the bedroom curtains closed all day and, after sunset, plugging in a huge industrial gadget my husband hauled in from the shed when he discovered that the particular fan he wanted had completely sold out in the shops and online.

He erected it on his side of the bed, arguing that he was less able to tolerate the intense heat than I was.

The thing rotated at a glacial speed all night, groaning loudly and making no appreciable difference to me while, at the same time, I estimated angrily, consuming 10 times more energy than, for example, it would take to boil a hundred kettles.

(Boiling kettles, especially thoughtlessly filled-to-the-top ones, to make just one cup of tea, is a bit of an issue in our house these days. You have to pick your times or else remember to pour in only the tiniest drop of water if you want to avoid the economics lecture. But when it comes to electric fans, it seems, the obsession about the ESB bill goes straight out the window.)

Anyway, as I said, after a bit of a wait, the new fans arrived. One was large and blue and wide. The other was a tall black pillar with lots of buttons.

In the daytime, they were placed side by side in front of my husband’s place at the table, pointing directly into his face to facilitate the consumption of meals – his meals - in an enjoyably cool breeze.

In the evening, they were moved upstairs - to his side of the bed – in order, yes, to facilitate (his) sleep in the same enjoyably cool breeze.

One of the fans featured an atomiser, which, he mansplained, was a specialised ultrasonic component that dispersed water in an ultra-fine mist of droplets. This is evaporated by the fan very quickly while at the same time cooling the air around him without actually making his face damp.

I was in such a state of murderous irritation by this stage that I said nothing, for fear, as my mother used to say, of what I might conceivably come out with.

To my thinly-veiled delight, two days after the fans arrived, the cold, the rain, the chill and the usual misery of the normal Irish summer returned.

The fans, I declared gleefully, would have to go out to the shed. There was no room for them in the house, nor was there any further need for them. Total waste of money.

“We’ll need them again when the heat comes back,” he argued.

“We?” I questioned, raising a frigid eyebrow.

“What is this ‘we’, Tonto?” He ignored this.

Experts, he mansplained, had said that global warming meant this kind of summer heat was going to come more often.

It might even become the norm.

It might even come back in a week or two!

Experts, he continued, had warned that Irish houses were generally not built to deal with the kind of heat we’d been having so we were all going to have to adapt our homes for the kind of intense night-time warmth we’d been experiencing this summer.

Hence the need for his fans.

I’d be glad of his fans one of these days for all my smirking, he observed.

“I don’t see why,” I retorted, “not having had the privilege of enjoying them to date.”

Out to the shed with them now, I declared triumphantly, and while he was at it, he might as well dig out all those new cans of paint we’d bought for the sitting-room and get on with the painting.

After all, I reminded him, he’d promised to start the painting on the first wet day.

And this, as I womansplained with relish to his crestfallen face, was, erm, the first wet day.

Revenge, as they say, is best served cold.