The omens predicted warm weather – but they have been proved very wrong

I have endured monsoon storms, equatorial deluges and plagues of rain-borne toads but none compete with a wet day in Ardmore

My apologies to James Joyce for literary grand theft, but no other phrase will do: rain is general all over Ireland. We arrived a week ago for our annual retreat on the Waterford coast, stopping off in the beautiful Vale of Avoca for a family wedding. The sun shone all day and we went home under a golden moon. But the next thing I know it is morning and water is spitting against the window. Tricked we were, by the one gorgeous day of the summer. The Irish weather is the beautiful maiden who turns into a hag with the first kiss. Since the day of the wedding, rain in all its forms has been falling steadily.

A day or two of rain I can take. I can even find it vaguely alluring, typically Celtic, as much part of the landscape around here as the cliffs and green fields. For a day or two. But we are now heading into week two of the holiday and as I look out across the bay the rain clouds continue to stack up. On a fair day I could stand on the wall above the boat cove and see the distant Comeragh Mountains and all the shades of green and brown in the valleys between. Look out now and all I can see is a wall of mist.

The rain we get here is of the creeping, insidious, get inside the tiniest opening in your waterproof variety. This is a particular delight when you decide to fish or go for a walk. I have endured monsoon storms in Rangoon, equatorial deluges in the Congo, plagues of rain-borne toads in Colombia, but none can compete with a wet Friday afternoon in Ardmore. Some small consolation can be found in hearing that Britain has been drenched; the arrival of The Independent with its Review cover asking "Why does it always rain on me?" has been greeted with general appreciation. But soon enough the claustrophobic wretchedness of our own predicament returns and the day stretches into watery nothingness, only the delights of writing this column to keep madness at bay.

I face the challenge of every Irish parent who optimistically decided that we were "due a good summer". According to this reckoning there is a just God who after seasons of rain will deliver a Mediterranean microclimate into this small corner of south-east Ireland. The initial omens were hopeful. For weeks now our local beaches have been littered with rotting jellyfish; out on the bay the salmon fishermen have been complaining about the vast shoals of them clogging their nets. I was raised to believe that jellyfish were a sign of warm weather on the way. My faith in old piseogs (the sayings of the elders) lasted as long as my first swim.

Now if you've played and swum in Irish waters since the age of one, a resistance to cold water should be part of your bodily makeup. But I swear the water this year is savage, brutal, ugly, vicious water with a grudge; pit-bull water that goes for your vitals and doesn't let go. I only got down because my six year old – happily encased in his wet-suit – taunted me. With nothing but a pair of ancient swimming shorts for protection I plunged and, hitting the water, was momentarily caught for breath. After the shortest swim in the history of water sports I stood up and felt a constricting pain across my back, chest and abdomen.

"Heart attack!" I thought and started to panic. It wasn't, of course, a heart attack, but my sage friend John King, who will only swim in tropical waters, told me over coffee afterwards that I had suffered mild shock. The pain was apparently caused by the blood rushing from the extremities to protect the vital organs. Well that's all right then.

So, with swimming out of the question, how do you stay sane in a small cottage with a bouncing six-year-old? First you enrol him in the art class in St Declan's Hall where for two hours every morning this week patient local women have been cultivating the artistic sensibilities of bored hordes of children. The art class ended yesterday but, hurrah, a Gaelic football camp is starting next week! Again the two-hour time limit applies but what glorious peace.

I have used it so far to read Margaret MacMillan's magnificent account of the 1919 Versailles peace conference Peacemakers. It is the perfect book for this weather: intensely detailed, filled with accounts of skulduggery in the Balkans and Middle East, a litany of broken promises and shattered dreams along with glorious pen pictures of David Lloyd George, Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson. If you are trapped in the rain somewhere, go and buy this book. It is the intellectual equivalent of a life raft.

My other vital resource is an old copy of David Thomson's Woodbrook, described by Olivia Manning as "a haunting sadness, a memory and a dream". I am told that Thomson's account of his time spent as a tutor to an Anglo-Irish family at Woodbrook in County Roscommon is now out of print. If it is, Penguin Books should do the reading world a service and immediately get this masterpiece back into circulation. Thomson writes of the Irish landscape, and of his love for the daughter of the house, with an understated poignancy, which only helps to make this story of loss all the more unbearable. On a night when the rain is rattling our tin roof, I sit closer to the fire and read of an Irish summer at Woodbrook between the two world wars.

"We swam all afternoon, plunging in from the boat and climbing back again or taking it in turns to row while the other swam from one beautiful stretch of water to another. We went up the Boyle River past the Salmon Hole, along a narrow winding stretch of water, and this time the leaves above us made it liquid green.... My hands must sometimes have been warm by then from resting on the sun-blistered paintwork of the boat, for I can remember distinctly how cold and wet her skin was at my first touch and how in a second or two the warmth of her body came through. Even on hot days some parts of the lake were like iced water from the mountain streams that fed Lough Gara and Lough Key and the River Boyle. Now, almost 40 years later, I find that my clearest memories are those of touch."

Which naturally sets the mind to remembering distant summers and the same wonder of first love, the intoxicating confusion of touch and scent, long walks home across the stubble of freshly harvested fields, and the once-in-a-lifetime feeling that time wasn't moving at all. As the poet Paddy Kavanagh wrote: "... lost the long hours / all the women that loved young men".

But waking up from all of that I am still 41 years old and the rain is still falling and a small voice is saying over and over: "I am bored". Nothing is left but to embrace the rain. Don't listen to the weather forecast. Get wet and like it and afterwards enjoy the luxury of a hot shower and hotter tea.

So we will set off for Whiting Bay as soon as these last words are written and dig for lugworm and catch shrimp and convince ourselves that it cannot last forever. Any minute now I expect to see a clearance from the west. And, if not now, then at least tomorrow.

I remain, optimistically, yours.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent.