Jim Hopkins: Bombs away and the golden weather is bound to return

Do not despair, brothers and sisters. Be of good cheer. For it is written: Verily, every cloud has a silver lining - even the mushroom ones.

Older readers will know this.

Older readers will recall the halcyon summers of the 1950s.

They will remember a time when the weather was golden; a dutiful servant eager to offer its mortal masters a climate of abiding delight.

And they will recollect how it used to rain, torrentially and without pause right up to 3pm on the last day of school when the headmaster, who was invariably cadaverous and inclined to dive under his desk every time there was a loud bang, would ring the bell and release his ragged charges to the warm embrace of summer.

At which point, instantly and without fail, the rain would stop, the clouds part and the sun would beam down on our nitless heads.

And, as the extinguished poet laureate Mr Jam Hipkins has observed, it would stay beaming all through the holidays, an orb of wonder in a windless sky:

At mid-day and midnight
And all the hours between
Bronzed Sols bright smile would shine upon
Youths supple saplings green
In those gone days of puppy play
We lived a daylight dream
Our only source of vitamins
A cone of cold icecream
Chock full of hokey pokey
How gold each piece did shine!
Dug by gallant working men in the hokey pokey mine
Huge was the hokey pokey then
T'was mined in massive chunks
Nearly as big as the grains of sand
That filled our b@#%&y trunks!!!!

Alas, those gilded, sun-burnt, sandwich days - full of cold boiled eggs - are but a faded memory. Gone! Gone! And the weather with them!

We don't get summers like that any more. These days, summer is a miserable wretch. Unpredictable, quixotic, volatile and prone to throwing atmospherical tantrums.

The young think it's meant to be that way. But older readers remember when summer was like a bag of State Coal - guaranteed to last forever and always keep you warm.

What they may not have considered is the reason why it was so.

Yet it's plain to see.

I claim the bomb! That was the reason. As soon as they stopped all those tests, things went haywire on the weather front.

El Nino crept back into the Pacific - an area it had sensibly avoided while the super-powers were atomising it - and, basically, we haven't had a decent day since.

Summer's now a couple of afternoons in March, which may explain the rising tide of violence in the classrooms of the nation.

In light of such depressing climatic and social developments, older readers in particular may take comfort from the news that North Korea has revived the laudable art of exploding atomic bombs hither and yon - or Pyon as its better known in that mysterious land.

Always assuming, of course, that they exploded an atomic bomb.

It could be that North Korea's Leader, Mr Kim Jong-Ill, has simply had one of those things the Marsden Fund wants to investigate, namely a modern orgasm.

That would certainly explain his unusual hairstyle and its electrifying air of post-coital dishevelment.

Moreover, if this week's tremors were nothing more than the aftermath of a modern orgasm, one obvious benefit does arise.

Should that be the case, George Bush would only need a single smart bomb full of Brylcreem to eliminate any threat.

But let's be optimistic. Let's assume it was a bomb.

Let's assume Mr Ill wasn't indulging in the sort of Stalinist shenanigans that might attract the attention of the Marsden Fund. Let's assume he was doing the decent thing and detonating an atomic device.

Well then, the sooner we get Winston over there the better - smothered in insect repellent. We wouldn't want top-level talks breaking down for medical reasons.

Especially since, insofar as Mr Ill apparently considers nuclear salvation more important than starvation, Winston could do a food-for-fusion deal and bring a couple of small bombs back; one to be detonated north of Dargaville so the rest of us finally get a good old 1950s summer again and the other for the Auditor General, who's about as popular in Wellington as the average imperialist in Pyongyang.

Best of all he could tell Mr Ill that New Zealand helped to get him started.

In 1945, just days after the attack on Hiroshima, our Government was proudly proclaiming its role in the atomic bombs development.

The then Minister of Scientific and Industrial Research, Mr D.G. Sullivan, said that "Seven New Zealanders took part in the research work... "

He explained how, in 1944, the British had asked Prime Minister Peter Fraser if New Zealand would release "some of her best brains to assist in atomic research" and Mr Fraser had readily agreed.

Newspaper reports in 1945 also quoted the Minister saying "New Zealanders should be proud to learn that New Zealand scientists of this generation were in the forefront of research started by another New Zealander, Lord Rutherford."

Older readers will instantly note it's not just the weather that's changed.