Stay cool, peeps.
Thinking of my Melbourne friends today who’ve been baking in 45ºC temps and won’t be getting much relief any time soon. I do remember a week like that in QLD at least three decades back. I was living in a sharehouse in Bardon, up in the rainforest, and we basically just sat under the house for a week, training the hose on each other and sipping beer.
Jonathan Green had a lovely piece, for what it’s worth, recalling his own scorched childhood…
Sitting today with the hot memories from very distant boyhood. Of Adelaide sweltering, waiting through a baking day with the winds pouring hot from the hills, eager for that first relieving whisper of an evening sea breeze.
I remember the houses of elderly relatives, locked down tight from early morning. They knew the drill: welcome the evening air then close the place down. Pull the curtains, shut the doors and windows tight. The long canvas rolled blinds came down to shade in porches, the bottom wooden bar secured with a buckled strap of leather to a metal loop in the polished concrete floor.
Come midday these homes were comparatively cool burrows, dark, a little airlessly close, the occasional chilled bottle of Woodroofe’s lemonade produce from a fridge that spilled light into a deeply shaded kitchen.
But the thing that struck me, as it always does, was JG calling out the weirdly celebratory media coverage… “Hottest ever! Hottest place on earth! … 50 degrees! Punching above our weight,” but no mention of course, ‘of the long causal chain that has brought us here, of climate change, coal and culture war.’
We had 37º in Brisneyland for Bogan Day, which wasn’t enough to dissaude my daughter from marching in the protests, so good for her. I hid out in my air conditioning and tried to work. That was a big fail because I was still seething and raging about the bullshit in Minnesota. But I did better today by not reading the news from the US, instead starting my day with a tech podcast. It was weirdly (or maybe not so weirdly) relaxing to listen to a couple of nerds nerding out on nerd stuff even as the world came apart, and I think I might do that more often.
We're on the opposite side of Port Phillip Bay to Melbourne and we were supposed to get to 44°C too but topped out at 37 pretty early, so a lucky escape. The dry heat helps enormously. I'd be dying if I was still in NSW.
I note that the Guardian had not one mention of "Australia Day", apart from maybe the honors list and AOTY (and even then not the headline), otherwise it was either Invasion Day or 26 Jan. Peeps are over it.
I had rellies over from the UK last week. Told them that at present I was not able to travel back to the land of my birth due to not renewing my British passport for the last 15 years, and they seemed uninterested in my plight, telling me the UK sucks now, so I sent them up to the Pinnacles in 45 degrees.