On the third day, when the sun rose again, everyone expressed their relief. "Isn't it great to see the sun again?" I was asked wherever I went, as though my memory span extended no more than 48 hours.
Last week, a news story solemnly reported, complete with references to "Jack Frost", that the coldest night of the year had taken place. That was a little presumptuous given we're not even halfway though. Not really news, is it? There's a coldest night of the year most years.
They're worse in Australia, Sydney in particular. The residents of that city are so in thrall to the myth that their home is a place of eternal sunshine - Bondi, the harbour, surfing and so on - that when it rains, which it does a lot, they act as though they have never seen such a thing. Traffic comes to a standstill as drivers lose control in the moist conditions, and everyone turns up at work soaked because why would we have a raincoat or an umbrella when we live in Sydney?
In New Zealand, we have little in the way of seasonal extremes. The changing of the seasons is something noted by looking at a calendar rather than marvelling as fields burst into bloom or the ice on our roofs thaws. Occasionally, there are hailstorms with hail the size of confetti, and every year brings a destructive storm or two but typhoons are rare, bushfires hardly ever wipe out communities and death from heatstroke is almost unknown.
Yet we manage to make a meal of the weather, fretting over forecasts and speculating on how much longer this interminable rain/heat/temperate condition will last. So what does our inability to cope with moderate weather without making a drama of it tell us?
One theory about the origins of religious belief is that it provided explanations for such natural phenomena as rain and suns and their effect on fertility. Perhaps there is a residue of this belief behind our obsession with the weather. Auckland had one of its most spectacular electrical storms for many a year on the night New Zealand played the United States in the FIFA Under-20 World Cup against a background of the Sepp Blatter saga.
You don't have to be a meteorologist or a high priest to see a divine hand at work there.
The most important weather story of all goes barely reported. Climate change is just too hard for us to deal with. But unless we make that our main weather obsession we may indeed soon find that we really do need to have a serious conversation about the weather.
Sepp Blatter doesn't seem to be any better than he should be, but he performed the useful service of demonstrating that the national enthusiasm for sanctimony is as strong as ever.
The nation seemed to rise as one as his misdemeanours were revealed. Summoning up a wealth of dudgeon and outrage to excoriate an individual of whom hardly anyone had heard just a few days earlier.
