Why feel cheated by missing summer? – Wyn Drabble

There are plenty of positives about the lacklustre summer, writes Wyn Drabble.

Do you feel cheated when the peak holiday season fails to deliver the clement summer weather you’ve come to expect?

I do. In our house, we even had the heat pump on for the first two weeks of January! Whatever next!?

According to weather experts, it’s a result of La Nina arriving in summer for only the second time in 75 years, leading to more moist easterly winds than we usually encounter. The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (Niwa) says a La Nina watch will be in place until March, though what that means, I don’t really know. I think I was away from school the day they did that.

I would have preferred better weather, but only to a certain degree. I wasn’t hoping for oppressive heat. I’ve had oppressive heat and it’s not pleasant. The highest daytime shade temperature I have experienced is 46C. I immersed myself in Sydney Harbour for much of it.

However, it is debatable whether 30C in a tropical climate is more uncomfortable than 40C-plus in a more temperate zone.

But enough of the grumbling. Let’s try to find some positives in the holiday-period weather we were served, which it appears we might continue experiencing through summer.

The need for garden hosing is cut right back. There is no need to juggle odd or even days; both should see a good dose of natural irrigation from the moist easterlies.

It provides excellent reading weather. If your list of must-reads is growing, you could do some catching up and delete titles from your list with a showy flourish. You might even have time to start writing your own novel – or at least get the pages numbered.

The danger of sun-related damage to your skin is seriously reduced. The factor-50-plus sunscreen will hardly be touched, clearly a positive given the price of the stuff.

There is very little crud to scrape from the barbecue because so many meals move indoors during moist easterlies. Who could possibly have a beef with that?

The incidence of nocturnal kamikaze attacks diminishes markedly. When the nights are cooler, the mosquitoes seem to go somewhere else. I don’t know where. Just away. And as far as I’m concerned, away is good.

At bedtime during summer, I generally spray my upper body with a repellent called Off; for the first week of January, I didn’t need to put Off on. Or, to put it another way, I left Off off.

You are also unlikely to experience those rather sleepless warm nights spent with only a sheet over you in bed. You’ll be able to snuggle up in a generously blanketed cocoon. Cosy.

Finally, if you need to write La Nina often, you’ll get plenty of practice locating the tilde on your keyboard and placing it carefully over the letter “n” when required. It won’t be an issue if you are just speaking it because, as Victor Borge once humorously illustrated, we don’t verbalise punctuation.

If only the Danes or Norwegians would add to the meteorology lexicon, I could also practise my “o” with a diagonal line through it.

So, there you are. I’ve offered seven positives about the lacklustre summer. Let’s stop grumbling and get on with it. Ensure the clothes dryer is in tip-top working condition and make the most of those moist easterlies. Keep focusing on my list of positives.

Finally, the weather outlook: particularly in eastern regions, expect plenty of cloud, more rain and lower temperatures than usual, and way more unseasonal outbreaks of tildes.