Riders on the storm

It’s a common misconception that the rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. In fact that’s a lie.The rain in Spain falls mainly in Ireland. Thanks a million Amigos!

And just as Eskimo’s have 17 thousand different words for snow, field archaeologists have at least double that number for rain. From the tundra-cold sideways strain, to the fine micro drizzle that gets you wetter than if you’d jumped headfirst into a lake, the archaeological palette is finely tuned to rain’s many qualities of wetness.

There’s son-of-a-nut-monkey rain; mc-dick-fingers rain; glacier-of-shit rain; bitchnuts rain; ballsack-ziptrap rain; dickle-bummer-glory rain; cumulo-pissynickers rain… and on it goes, and on it goes, an endless roll call of rain drizzling from now to eternity.

In sunnier climes, The Cloud Appreciation Society spends hours lying in grassy meadows pondering the aesthetic qualities of cloud formations, in a manner not dissimilar to a purveyor of fine wine. Field archaeologists are their sodden, polluted (and clearly demented) by-product; with one foot in the past, the other foot in the pub, and not a moment to dry-out between.

It now seems like a distant memory, but in the rainy days of the Irish road schemes, if a site became navigable only by boat, the crew would knock off early enough to be in the pub by 12. Well, baton down the hatches, cause the word round the facebook camp fire is there’s a storm brewing, and its not in a teacup.

On Saturday the 10th of October, the Cobblestone pub in Dublin will be flash mobbed in tribute to these damp soldiers of fortune (Peter Andre calls them ‘archiaholics’). Scheduled to coincide with the hotly tipped Indian summer (i.e. Monsoon Season), all you have to do is turn up in a viz vest, wet pants and be prepared to dig in for the day. Bring stories, songs and a general mucky demeanour.

It’s gonna be a long day: they’ve forecast a dickle-bummer-glory.

3 comments

  1. Kitty says:

    >I'm still at uni, but for me it wouldn't be a proper fieldtrip if it didn't rain! My first was a geology trip to the east coast of Scotland – the rain made our notebooks and hand-outs stick together, and the lecturer's voice was whipped away by the wind – but it gave us all something to talk about, it was rather friendship building 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *