KEY POINTS:
Summer is coming to an end here in the capital, and not with a bang but a whimper.
The clouds sag a little lower, the hydrangeas are turning brown, the days are cooler, and the nights are losing that beguiling hint of balminess that plants the idea of al fresco dining.
Like re-marriage, eating outside at night in Wellington represents the triumph of hope over experience. The newish barbecue, the centre of attention and recipient of lavish compliments only a month ago, is now ignored, like a schoolgirl whose friends have turned against her.
The cook is prepared to do his thing, but there's little demand for it because of the mindset that warm weather and barbecues go together like cold weather and hearty stews.
Like the All Blacks, our wood-burner gets two months off a year.
I was slightly ashamed of having lit a fire in mid-February until the weather came up in conversation with renowned photographer and hardy adventurer Peter Bush. He admitted he'd had the heater on that same night.
The surest indication that summer's winding down is the annual media chorus bewailing the kick-off of Super 14 just as the cricket season's coming to the boil. Only in the figurative sense, as the touring Indians quickly found out: according to the commentators, the temperature out on the ground during Wednesday night's 20/20 match in Christchurch was around 12C.
The Indians say they've come prepared, no doubt having reviewed footage of the West Indies tour earlier this season and glumly taken note of the Calypso Kings waddling around swathed in the best part of a bale of wool and blowing on their hands like hobos huddled around a brazier. The truth is our summers are so patchy that cricket fans shouldn't complain that rugby only stops for three months; they should give thanks it stops at all.
The fact that our climate isn't ideal for cricket was reinforced when the Black Caps pitched up in Perth for the start of the Chappell-Hadlee series. The Aussie commentators belaboured the point that our boys would be loving the sunshine after the constant rain interruptions during the West Indies series.
A few days later bushfire raged through Victoria, reminding us that nature often gives with one hand and takes away with the other. The rain that dogged the cricket makes New Zealand a green and fertile land; the sunshine on demand that makes Australia a playground can also turn it into a tinderbox.
Australia may see itself and be seen, here perhaps more than anywhere, as the lucky country but as an English cricket writer observed 45 years ago, "nature in Australia, moving violently from drought to flood, is essentially hostile".
Historians are divided over whether President Franklin D. Roosevelt was talking about the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza or his Dominican Republic counterpart Rafael Trujillo or some other uniformed thug with a Swiss bank account when he said,
"He may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch." In fact the anecdote is probably apocryphal, a vivid encapsulation of the folly and swagger masquerading as Realpolitik that led the US to prop up tin-pot tyrants in practically every corner of the globe.
Our summers might be Clayton's summers that dazzle for a week then disappoint for a fortnight, but they're ours. We were in Canterbury over Christmas and New Year. On Christmas Day we played croquet rugged up like Jamaicans in Invercargill. A few days later we strolled around Ohinetahi, Sir Miles Warren's justly celebrated formal garden in Governors Bay, in glorious sunshine.
Then it got really hot. We watched cricket at Lincoln buffeted by a fiery nor'-wester and slept fitfully under sweat-dampened sheets. The day after we left, the mercury hit 40C in parts of Christchurch. Hawkes Bay was perfect: one hot - but not oppressively hot - day after another.
Perhaps the solution to cricket's perennial weather and pitch problems is to play all big games at McLean Park in Napier. The Indians, on whose largesse the game here is increasingly reliant, would probably be all for it.
Being under the impression that you can't go wrong with vineyard restaurants, it was a rude shock to discover, on the road to Lincoln, that there's an exception to every rule. Where better than Hawkes Bay to get back on the horse and restore the belief that our vineyard restaurants are a national treasure?
All in all, it's been a pretty good summer, as most of them are. Rather than lament its passing, let's make the most of what's left. It could be a long, cold winter.
