Editorial: If the lambs can take it so can we

There is blossom in the Hawke's Bay air today - along with a fair smidgen of irony.

For on the day we celebrate the spring and its cheerful pretty coloured blossoms and optimistic taste of the better climes to come there are snow flurries drifting low to the west, and the wind has a less than cheerful feel of winter about it.

I am starting to think that no matter what day the hard-working and devoted drivers of the Blossom Parade through Hastings choose it will decide to arrive in an un-springlike fashion.

It's like the mid-summer drought-breaking recipe.

As the landscape simmers and browns off and water is scarce you just have to make a call to New Zealand Cricket and ask them to stage a one-day international game at McLean Park.

By the fourth over the covers will be coming out and people will be sheltering from the showers under the bank-top palms.

It was the same last year - a southerly snap rolled through to "welcome" the colourful, blossom-clad floats in the great parade.

It's odd, because it seems to defy the theory of global warming which gets the blame for everything these days.

I daresay if we were to get knocked out of the Rugby World Cup global warming would come into it somewhere.

I can recall childhood years of attending the Blossom Parades and my memory (albeit an average piece of biological machinery) tells me they were occasions of sunshine and warmth.

Shorts and jandals.

But at the end of the day what really matters is not what the weather holds, despite the occasion being a sort of welcome to spring and the imminent summer days ahead.

It is all about celebrating the blend of blossom and the bay.

Of festival and fun.

The blossom markets and the family fun, and of course the big parade.

Who we are, where we are and what we have.

And what we may need to have today is a warm jacket or coat but hey, if the spring lambs can take a bit of a southerly on the chin so can we.