Was it the rain last week? Perhaps those clouds that flitted past yesterday afternoon without the cleansing and refreshing benefit of a change to go with it? Or perhaps it’s those onshore winds that are driving the moisture off a swollen ocean into this city?
No matter! Today Sydney is back to sultry, overcast and H U M I D.
Chances are, for the next four months, it will be variations on a theme, interspersed with occasional sunshine, or a clearing cool change, along with attendant variations of rain, hail, storm and cyclone.
It’s one reason we decided that we would seek respite in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales, settling on an ample garden and the cool breezes through tall eucalypts for our twilight years sometime hence. Later this week we’ll own our new home, away from the madding crowd. We look forward to warm evenings sitting out on the verandah (stoop, if you are South African) – enjoying the hum of evening insects, chanting birds and distant calls of cattle in the fields not far away.
It is of course holiday time for many. The streets of inner city Paddington were free from horns and hard-pressed commuters this morning. The insistent calls of Mynah (or sometimes Myna) birds are just a bit more intrusive than usual. Pests though they are, their calls give a semblance of present nature.
Children, as they amble along next to weary parents and grandparents, seem to tug reluctantly at the caring hands just a little more impatiently than usual. Elderly gentlemen complete with walking sticks and cream-coloured hats, with belts around their waistlines half-way-up their chests, pause for restorative breath rather more often than usual. And they glance up across the top of their tortoise shell glasses frames.
The sunglass-covered faces of the A-List would-be’s from the Eastern Suburbs have just a little bit less spring in their step or enthusiasm for that second skim-soy-latte coffee as they feel their discomfort in overly tight clothing, facing the inconvenience of actually parking their smart cars instead of double parking as is their wont, and, you know, like, actually walking!
When I was growing up in London, we’d have days like this. Instead of it being the 32°C it is today with 85% humidity it was a steamy 24 degrees. Oh the heat. Immediately London would be full of men who had rummaged through their wardrobes to produce generations old linen jackets, crumpled and shapeless, but light in colour and great breathable fabric, whatever the look.
It was enough to make exhausted office workers from stifling smoke-filled offices rush out to their local park – Hampstead Heath in my case, or Regent’s Park in later years, – both wonderful London parks, – and roll up their long grey trousers and fold their handkerchief into some quaint headgear with twisted corners, turning their prostrate bodies toward the searing heat of the sun. In less than their lunch hour a certain tell-tale reddish hue would adorn their faces. That was the life. But as they commuted home there was, in the sixties and seventies, an indefinable odour in the Underground. It gave life to a long-running ad campaign in Tube trains. A self-satisfied gentleman staring out from the advertisement on the wall of the train, in seeming contentment, while two pained faces looked in at him from either side, catching him unawares. “Someone isn’t using Amplex,” preached the message.
It was the first the Brits had heard of deodorants.
That was the era of council house bathroom techniques applied weekly, when the copper bath was taken out and set amidst the kitchen for the whole family to progressively have their weekly bath. Britain and bathing were not words once tended to use together. When I arrived in Australia some four decades ago the standard line was, “There’s nothing dryer than a Pom’s towel.” Of course such a claim would be regarded as racist and offensive today!
Margaret Thatcher put an end to that era as she sold off more than half a million council houses, all of which had to be upgraded for sale and brought to a minimal government-determined standard. Thirty-years-on the debate looms large again in London as council sell-offs continue. But rather than the tenants buying, it’s wealthy landowners and investors buying up and leasing back to an ever-more disenfranchised group of Londoners. Many of that Thatcher aspiring middle class will never be able to afford to live where their roots are in their community. Home ownership is not for lower or middle class people any more, it seems in Britain.
And so it is in the Cities of Australia. Housing affordability has reached the point that many of today’s ‘thirty-somethings’ won’t own their own home until their parents die and vacate the family home. Over 50,000 families currently await social housing at the start of the housing ladder. With interest rates mostly rising in coming years, chances are things will get worse before they get better.
With society moving in the next decade to develop strategies to combat climate change, the capital costs of individual homes will rise, as solar energy investments add between $16,000 and $20,000 to the capital cost of homebuilding, even though they will lower running costs. Air conditioning will take on new thresholds of affordability, as households progressively have to meet emission targets in the next couple of decades, an inevitable consequence of finally having to do something to combat ever-warmer temperatures.
So, as we ‘rug-up’ this coming winter in temperatures some 7° to 9°C cooler than Sydney, and snuggle under a couple of extra layers of blankets, it will be with some satisfaction that we know the following summer’s heat will be a so much more palatable than Sydney’s sweltering sidewalks, and humidity much lower to the point that air conditioning is all but unnecessary.
We’ll also rejoice in the fact that our Southern Highlands home cost us just half the price of the wonderful apartment we enjoyed in Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Paddington. And as we tuck into the beats, broccoli and spinach of our autumn/winter crop of home-grown vegetables, we’ll also know that any waste is suitably composting away in the bottom corner of the garden, strengthened by the vigour of the adjacent worm farm. Country town living has a lot to commend it.
As you mop your brow from the sultry grey air of the metropolis tonight, steel yourselves for the hot muggy days ahead. If you are slugging it out in twenty-below temperatures of the US mid-west, comfort yourself that in just five months, on the Columbus Day holiday weekend, you’ll be able to go down to the edge of Lake Michigan, pop your toe in the water and know that your three months of summer is just around the corner. That’s if your house hasn’t been blown away by the ever-more-frequent tornadoes powering through from the storm-filled skies of Texas, Missouri and Illinois.
No matter where in the world you are, the weather always gives us something to complain about. But if you make the time to be present in what you have, life may not seem so bad. In fact being this side of the turf is indeed heaven on earth! Never was that more evident than today, as the world mourns the loss yesterday of 4-decade musician extraordinaire, David Bowie, who died of cancer after an 18-month battle.
As the inimitable words of the Steve Boon and John & Mark Sebastian song put it,”
“Hot town, summer in the city, Back of my neck getting dirty and gritty
Been down, isn’t it a pity, Doesn’t seem to be a shadow in the city
All around, people looking half dead
Walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head.…”
For some, the heat is gone, snuffed out. Yet conversely, the power of the heat lives on, in music.
(The Storm that wasn’t – Video (Time-lapse on 11 January, 2016 in Sydney:)
https://vimeo.com/user16721090/review/151359443/1711380dc4
All Rights Reserved. © Copyright John Swainston, 2016,
excepting the words from Summer In The City, quoted above,
(© Carlin/SONY-ATV Music, 1966 – Loving Spoonful.)
Love your reflexxions…one of the main reasons that Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs are expensive is that the summer humidity is often driven inland by the North Easterlies and the inevitable Southerly Buster. Or, as my father’s Sydney sonnet describes:
Sydney’s Nor-Easter likes to sleep in late
at start of summer, rather diffident;
just little patchy puffs to indicate
soft gentleness of manners and intent.
Then, as the ruffles on the water blend,
it slowly gathers force, at even pace;
maintaining all the day a rising trend:
life, gaiety and sparkle join the race.
As evening comes it slowly dies away
and goes to bed again to gather strength.
With growing confidence it starts each day;
an early start and later nightly length
It’s rhythm spent. Oppression seems to hang
Southerly-buster kills it with a bang.
Simon
Wonderful to read this work all these years later. The level of his vitriolic outbursts when the NorEaster brought in oppressive humidity, was wondrous to behold. I kept out of his way when he was in full flight on the subject! Little did I know he’d captured its moods so beautifully. Thanks for sharing.
Better in Willunga John !
Great reflexxion John. I look forward to many more.