"Even birds stay away when weather is foul"
After enduring the monsoons of autumn last week, I began to get a little rain weary and almost made a terrible mistake.
Having explained in an earlier missive about how I repel the very thought of winter and its unwanted accomplices (rain and frosts and grim southerlies), I set pen to paper (well, finger to keys actually) to point out that those seemingly endless days of wet weather would have been nothing to a Dubliner.
Ah yes.
Targeting dear old Oirland as a place to have a crack at climatically is far too tempting.
But the Dubliners can have the last laugh. For in terms of rain we, on average, get more than they do.
Luckily I did some intensive research (OK, I hooked into Google) and, as a result, I realised I would have been remiss in using Dublin as a damp spot on the face of the world.
For dear old Dublin averages just 741mm a year ... while Napier gets 793mm.
However, Hastings gets just 724mm so they have a few millimetres on their side ... although after the events of last week that figure is probably well in jeopardy for 2011.
Humans huh? We can start a destructive war and we can stop one ... but we can't start fine weather and we can't stop falling rain and rising water.
Weather and nature. They rule.
I don't know if it were coincidental or connected in any way but, on the Sunday, before the rainstorms surged in from the east there were few birds about.
Being an avid feeder of birdlife, I put the usual offerings out in the evening but only three or four sparrow dropped by.
No thrushes or starlings or blackbirds.
Had they deemed it more advisable to be somewhere else?
And, on Thursday morning, after the deluge, and as the back of the section had begun breaking the surface again, they were up there in the trees.
There was still light drizzle in the air but the birds were back. During the rains, I saw none.
But, on Thursday morning, they were back. A fine omen, I concluded.
The boss of one of the emergency crews who toiled to clear roads described the third day of continual falling rain as "a bit depressing".
He said the crews needed a window ... a break in the weather ... to gain control. But they hadn't got it.
They would have felt like the fighter pilots of southern England in 1941 when the Luftwaffe poured at them like an endless wave. "Can we win this?"
Well the fighter boys eventually did and so did the road crews - although, of course, great damage remained behind.
The folks across the Bay who were evacuated, whose homes were left in jeopardy, their daily lives derailed ... well, they would have been watching the television during the middle of our benign summer and shaking their heads at the plight of the Queenslanders whose state was submerging.
Nature isn't selective, of course.
It'll take an easterly-driven low pressure system, blend it in with another low, mix in some encroaching high-pressure system from the Tasman, and create a wet and wild vandal.
And it'll send them anywhere it likes.
"We live on a big island and, when the easterlies come, we get the rain," one of the council blokes said, putting it in a nutshell.
I am not a great fan of the rain, although I don't mind the northerly-driven drizzle clouds as they possess some warmth.
After three days of the stuff, and having seen at close-hand the damage it had delivered, I was getting as scratchy as anyone.
To the point where (after the birds appeared on Thursday) I kept a brief diary for the rest of the day to warm, and dry out, my heart.
6.37am: The George's Drive creekbanks were visible.
6.51am: Light drizzle - only intermittent wipers required.
10.36am: Small patches of blue sky observed to the southwest.
11.14am: Sun emerges and beams across city for seven minutes.
11.38am: Light drizzle detected again - dissipates after 11 minutes.
12.07pm: Tennyson St road surface dry.
12.14pm: Shadows visible - cast from the Art Deco light standards.
I quit it then and spent time doing more intensive research (yep, with Dr Google) and drew more heart from the long-range forecast ... ignoring of course the prospect there was more forecast rain ahead in days to come.
I also drew heart from one bloke loosely associated with the weather business who said we'd simply got the "annual weather bomb" a month early.
Was that really it for the inclement season?
For all those now struggling to build a path back to normality I do very much hope so.
Roger Moroney is an award-winning journalist for Hawke's Bay Today and observer of the slightly off-centre.