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Friday, 25 May 2018

...and talk about the weather...


It is Friday morning.  I am listening to the rain fall.  There is birdsong accompanying it.  It is one of the nicest sounds I know.

A curious phenomena (der der der-der-der) occurred this week.  The sun shone and the temperature rose and steadily stayed at T-shirt weather warm.  The wind hushed itself to the waftiest of breezes and the clouds fluffed themselves up nice and proper, and sat just so in the blue, blue sky.  I sat out and worked in the afternoon; a few days of being able to sit in the sunshine for a couple of hours of day and read and write and work.  One day I could see clear across to Wales and the homeland sung choirs and Sirened me but I wouldn’t budge.  The next day a beautiful haze hung over the valley and a smudged green blue grey looked back at me.  My arms went brown.


Being able to type “my arms went brown” is not something I would have been able to type over the past decade.  Down in New Zealand the sun wouldn’t brown my arms: it would red my arms.  My delicate Northern Hemisphere skin simply never came to terms with the ozoneless (is that a myth) barrage of rays that constituted weather down there.  The pity of it was that the sun didn’t actually have to be visible for me to suffer.

The last act of my dying teaching days in Otago was that of umpire for a school cricket match in Dunedin.  The first time I had experienced Dunedin weather came after I got on a bus in Oamaru in shorts and t-shirt, bathed in glorious, and then got off the bus at the train station in Dunners bathed in horizontal, cold rain and a howling wind.  Anyway, this time, fully prepared after ten years of horrible misjudgement of weather conditions, I donned my coat and hat and walked out onto the field of play ceilinged by a grey, overcast, relentlessly grey sky.  Muggy, sure, but grey; a Thomascene grey bobbing in the sky.  And I got burnt redder than a red thing that was embarrassed.  That was the practice in New Zealand for me.  I would put on sunscreen, I would wear a hat, I would put on after-sun.  I would go red.

The rain is still falling.  The birdsong is still accompanying it.  It is still the nicest sound.

I’d forgotten what it was to get a sun-tan.  I’d forgotten the Orwellian task of considering yourself a healthy looker as you corroded your covering.  The contradiction of the act hasn’t stopped me from getting out on to the bench in the gardens, here, and sitting and reading and writing and working.  The fringe of burn at the edge of the T-shirt sleeve is a comforting sensation that fades as the colour changes and becomes a brown not red façade.   The silence and the green and blue of the day is as pleasing as the fact that I am not reddening anymore.


And now, this morning and yesterday morning I have the rain.  Today is heavier and has the proper white noise mush of rainfall.  In Picton we would get this rain frequently.  It’s blanket noise, especially with the wriggly tin roof on the house, was reassuring and a blissful release for the brain.  The roof here is two floors further above me, I have no idea what sort of noise is it producing but the rain outside, occasionally enhanced by the sound of tyre on wet road, is singing a song this morning; a bubble of lush sound heartening me.

It’s going to be time to venture out into it soon.  The weather is warm, still, and the prospect of a second sunny holiday Monday hoves into view.  It’ll do me good to go out and get wet in this for a while.  To dampen any smouldering skin before the weekend comes and I sit and burn it further.  No wonder we sit and talk about the weather so often when it has an affect on us beyond the simple idea of wet and dry, warm and cold.  It can, you see, knock us head over heals.

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