Ireland, however, and despite the fact that it takes itself ever so seriously these days, still manages to come up with a verifiable silly season.
This is despite the fact that the Irish silly season is being squeezed by the ever more pressing imperatives of property prices, interest rates and the latest model cars, now available in mid-year with a label denoting the year yet to come.
Imagine if they tried that with wine. How silly indeed.
The idea of a strictly defined silly season is a myth really. Silly stories occur all year round. What makes the summer months different is that the news cycle slows because politics and other supposedly serious activities take a break.
This results in scary gaps in the daily digest that are the regular fuel of news organizations.
Editors get nervous. Reporters get nervous because editors are nervous. Then a phone rings. Somebody’s on the line saying that an eagle has flown away with a sheep, or that a hamster has attacked a Doberman.
While such calls might be given short shrift in January, the effect in July and August is akin to a fire alarm in a gunpowder factory.
This year, the silly season got off to an early start in the old sod with the tale of the Monaghan cat, believed by some to be an escaped Puma.
The reports of the beast have been centered in the Clones area. Clones has always been a hot spot for decent yarns. A few years ago, a classic was born in a pheasant farm just outside the town.
Cock pheasants have a nasty habit of pecking at their own eggs. So someone came up with the idea of fixing small pince-nez-like spectacles to their beaks. With these affixed, the cock couldn’t see what lay beneath its beak and so did not peck the eggs.
With the cat/puma roaming around, however, the solution took on a more drastic form, especially after reports of separate attacks on a calf, a goat and some ducks by a large feline creature in the Clones area.
Parents were warned to keep an eye out and watch their kids. A Garda helicopter was sent aloft to check for any beast out of the ordinary. An army marksman stationed at Monaghan barracks was told to lock and load, just in case.
Then someone got hold of a large domestic cat on film and it was suggested that the whole thing was a hoax, a case of mild hysteria, a silly season opening goal.
Still, the cops were keeping an open mind on the cat. The summer is yet young.
Arguably the all time classic Irish summer story of recent times was the moving statues phenomenon of 1985. It began early that year, in March, when two schoolchildren in Asdee, Co. Kerry, claimed that they had seen a statue of the virgin and child at their parish church move.
But it was March. The silly season was months away and few took much notice. By July, however, it was a different story altogether. When a report came through that Claire O’Mahony had seen a statue of the virgin move in a grotto in Ballinspittle, Co. Cork, the effect was as dramatic as it was instantaneous.
Crowds flocked to the village from all over Ireland and beyond. People, some of them not even Christian, claimed they saw movements. Soon enough, statues all over the country starting moving too.
Some cynics were quick to point out that because the summer was the wettest in years, places like Ballinspittle had to do something to attract visitors with money in their pockets.
And there was no arguing that Ballinspittle did well. At one point a guy with a food truck was making his retirement by selling “grotto burgers.”
This was a silly season classic and it went global.
Because of the obvious religious and spiritual sensibilities involved, the media gave it a long pass. Every report of a new moving statue was faithfully recorded in the Dublin papers and on national radio and television. By September, close to 30 statues around the country were reportedly in motion.
As is generally the case, the Catholic Church found itself having to do a balancing act. The phenomenon was outside its immediate control, so it had to roll along with each report, praising the overt signs of faith from so many without actually proclaiming the reports as being true and beyond reasonable doubt.
And so the statues moved. And they moved. And they moved.
And then the story hit a wall. As September turned into October, the news diaries began to fill up again with a return of government, the courts and other sundry state-related activities. The statues would have to, well, stand in line, and wait their turn for some ink.
The final demise of the moving statues story that year had another element, however and “IF” was witness to it.
In early October, a call came into a Dublin newsroom about a statue moving in the West Dublin district of Inchicore. The caller sounded serious and sober. A quick message was relayed to the deputy editor. “Statue moving in Inchicore” might have been the headline the following morning, but it was never to be.
The deputy editor frowned and paused a moment before delivering his verdict, ex cathedra, so to speak. “Statues, he said, do not move in Dublin.”
So that was it. They only moved in the country. Which is not to suggest that here was a biased Dub pouring scorn on the folks beyond the pale. He himself was a countryman. But he knew that every story had its limit. In this case it was the city limit. The moving statues story, a summer runner sans pareil, was on its last legs after that.
Still, the silly season of 1985, like a good wine, had already become a vintage.
2004 is just getting under way. A big cat in the wilds of Monaghan is a good start.
Perhaps the beast will cross the border and give folks there a bit of summer relief from all those past summers of marching feet and an absence of silliness so profound that it would depress the most hardened skeptic.