OPINION | Raining on my parade

I thought it was lack of sleep, or stress, or menopause; I thought it might be a nutritional deficiency, or perhaps it was too much sugar; maybe it was the news; I worried it was even, heaven forfend, the wine – then I thought maybe this is just what getting older feels like. Why else these aching limbs, joints pains, this stiffness of hips and shoulders, tenderness of skin, lethargy, irritability, sense of doom and the dread that the Irish rain is never, ever going to stop – like a B-movie starring Kevin Costner with a bad bejaysus-and-begorrah accent – even though objectively I’m sure it will… won’t it? Now, all you folks self-diagnosing with ADHD, OCD, BPD and PTSD (though surprisingly not STD), I see you and raise you: I appear to be meteorosensitive.

Possibly, it’s even meteoropathy. Yes, it’s a thing. The weather, chiefly this northern hemisphere winter, is trying to kill me.

Bring me my disability card now. I cannot be waiting around in the rain and the cold – I have a medical condition. Here in Dublin, we’ve had two-and-a-half times the usual rainfall for this time of year.

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Basically, I live in a sponge. This week – and last week, and the week before – it’s been coming down in sheets, coming down in greasy mists, coming down in icy pellets on sudden gusts of wind that blow underneath umbrellas and turn them inside out. It’s raining as I type.

It would be news if it wasn’t. The ground is so saturated that the grass slides around loosely like skin atop flesh. Add to this the cold, grey and dark, insert one sunshine-hearted South African, and voilà!

Meteorosensitivity. Online, I saw a video of a despairing fish flopping down an inundated road after the slow river I sometimes walk my dogs beside turned into a raging flood. I am that fish. This is not the psychological assault of seasonal affective disorder, but a physical thing, with atmospheric pressure, cold and damp causing discomfort and real bodily symptoms.

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