Paul Thomas: Summer of discontent

Wellington during one of it's better days. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Is this a new North Island record for the earliest fire of the year? I doubt it.

I suspect the current record holder is also a Wellington resident, and that he or she put match to paper and kindling before the new year was 24 hours old.

Of course Wellington's weather is a hoary old joke, like English cuisine, the German sense of humour, and American worldliness. But old chestnuts are old for a reason: they've stood the test of time.

Old chestnuts are based on fact - last year, Wellington had more rainfall than the other main centres and less sunshine than all but Dunedin - and empirical evidence. I remember flying from Sydney to Wellington one Christmas Eve, exchanging temperatures in the low 30s for conditions not unlike those which destroyed Napoleon's army on its retreat from Moscow. It did not fill me with goodwill towards all men.

Over New Year the temperatures in Christchurch nudged 30C. There was that moment on the flight home that Wellingtonians come to dread, when the pilot tells us what the weather will be like on arrival.

"Well, folks, we'll have you outside the terminal a few minutes earlier than scheduled thanks to a wee tail wind. Weather in the capital today: there's a brisk southerly, chance of a shower, and it's a mild 15 degrees."

The information is usually imparted with the diffidence of a stand-up comedian who has just remembered that last time he told this particular joke the audience began to talk among themselves.

They say you can't beat Wellington on a good day. That's possibly true - I've lived here for only 10 years - but I reckon this adage was dreamed up by the same ironist who named a spot on the Miramar Peninsula 'Scorching Bay.'

What makes Wellington's non-summer even harder to take is that the local paper has been running a feature in which writers reminisce about the summer holidays of their youth.

The careful reader will have noted that these perfect fortnights when the sun always shone and the sand was always golden were spent in places like the Marlborough Sounds, Bank's Peninsula, and the Coromandel. We're still waiting for a piece from someone who built sandcastles at Oriental Bay one January and lived to tell the tale.

These sun-dappled memoirs may be a little unreliable due to a combination of nostalgia and the fact that children regard summer as a state of mind, as opposed to a season with specific climatic characteristics.

Or perhaps summer just isn't what it used to be. Hawkes Bay supposedly has some of the best weather in the country, which is presumably why a lot of age-group cricket tournaments take place there in January. Before our first visit veterans of the age-group cricket circuit warned us about the merciless heat we'd encounter, but I've never seen goose bumps as large and profuse as those at Splash Planet in Hastings.

To the bemusement of the proprietor, we torched our rented cottage's supply of firewood, no doubt stockpiled for the winter, and like Oliver Twist, asked if we could have some more.

The silver lining in the clouds that often sag over Wellington like a rotting ceiling is that it's a great place for those who like a good fire. Our woodshed is bulging at the seams and we're looking good for 2011 having just this week felled a Lawson cypress and a substantial pine. But the serious - some might say obsessive - fire person can never rest on their laurels because too much wood is never enough.

Like the big chill engulfing the UK, Wellington's miserable excuse for a summer is grist to the mill for climate change sceptics and disbelievers. When Times columnist Giles Coren hit back with a piece arguing that the two things aren't related, it provoked a hostile response, mostly along the lines of what the hell would a restaurant critic - which Coren is - know about global warming? Apart from being ad hominem, it's disingenuous given that most of his denouncers obviously don't think renowned scientists with many years experience in the field know a damn thing about it either.

Contemplating another dismal weekend - southerlies, rain and low temperatures - I console myself with the thought that the Super 14 starts in four weeks. If there's one thing more predictable than an unseasonable January, it's that come March we'll be shaking our heads at the absurdity of playing a winter sport in such warm weather.