Attention Adelaideans: back to the olden days

I can't remember when it was that we actually got onto the power grid, down on the farm in the old days. I was probably still quite a little kid but I do have clear memories of the days before that when power came from the generator in the shed, and if something went wrong with the generator then it was back to kerosene lamps and candles. (And, if it was winter, open fires in the bedrooms and hot-water bottles in the beds, though I think we had those anyway.) Traditionally when the generator went cattywumpus we all sat round the kitchen table in the soft lamplight and played board games.

Given that the farmhouse was three miles from the township and a mile from the next farmhouse, we were a little island of light in a sea of darkness, unless of course there was a moon, or someone drove up the road past our gate and we watched as the headlights approached and then receded. My folks could usually tell who the driver was by the sound of the engine, the direction the car was travelling in, and the time of night. And I now know from experience that you internalise that kind of early security and carry it with you for the rest of your life.

What is it that has me musing on these bygone idylls? Why, the fact that Adelaide broke two more heat records over the last 24 hours, including Hottest March Night On Record (it didn't get below 30 degrees last night) and the power supply is being tested to its limits. There was a stressed-looking woman on the teeve tonight (though everyone in Adelaide is stressed-looking at the moment, so perhaps that's not relevant) from ETSA saying she thought that although the power supplies have held up amazingly so far, sooner or later all the aircon being left on all night -- few Adelaide houses are currently habitable without doing this -- was going to blow up something important and the power outages would start.

So I hope my fellow Adelaideans all know where the torches and the candles are and can find them in the dark when the lights go out. Last time I lost power here I set up five or six candles at different heights on the lounge-room table and sat there reading by candlelight. It was eerie and beautiful, with its interlocking circles of soft silver-gilt light, and most of all it was astonishingly peaceful and restful. I'm almost looking forward to a power cut so I can sit in the candlelight again, think of my late lamented Ma, and feel as though I'm pushing back the dark.

Oh. My. God.

What looked like serious cloud in the sky this afternoon turned out to be mostly smoke. Parts of the Adelaide Hills are on fire. Tomorrow it'll be 40 degrees with a northerly wind blowing. Temperatures near, at or over 40 are being forecast until next Wednesday, making a total of two and a half weeks of uninterrupted heatwave conditions.

Oh I know, this is Adelaide, yes. This is what we have, yes. There's a wonderful painting of the reading of the Proclamation of the Colony of South Australia on December 28th 1836, showing a lot of recognisable characters and a lot more unrecognisable ones gathered at the Old Gum Tree in North Glenelg for the historic occasion. They're dressed in full Victorian clobber and apparently it was 104 degrees Fahrenheit that day (not sure what that is in new money, probably more or less 40). But that was December. And I remember Ash Wednesday. But that was February.

I even remember the train journey when I moved to Victoria from South Australia, a night ride through the blazing Adelaide Hills with the bush on fire on both sides of us as we rushed through the darkness, with the cool change following just behind the train, and that was at the end of a two-week heatwave too, as I recall -- but that, too, was February. As it was the week the rainbow lorikeets fell dead from the sky into the back yard when it hit 42 three days in a row. As I said at the time, at least it meant there was something green on the ground.

But this is apocalyptic. We're almost into the third week in March. I'm dreading the crush in Haigh's when the temperature finally drops to 31, as it is forecast to do, two days before Good Friday, and I bet the Haigh's staff are, too. And it's hard to imagine what P and L are thinking as their outdoor wedding approaches. P is a doctor; it's entirely possible that he will have to interrupt his own wedding ceremony to leap into action when some overcome guest faints dead away.

As I lay prostrate and moaning in a darkened room over the weekend with an iced facewasher on my head, it did cross my mind to wonder how many deaths -- of, in particular, the very old, the very young and the very ill -- during this weather are partly or wholly heat-related. Especially when it goes on for two and a half weeks.

Not that the climate is changing, or anything alarmist like that.

Hottest New Year of the Century

In Adelaide, anyway. 42.4, which is about 109 in old money.

The weather forecast says there'll be a change overnight and it will only be 38 degrees tomorrow. Better find my Fair Isle beanie and leg-warmers.

To cool down and to mark the passing of the year, I'm going to find the relevant books and read two of my favourite poems. Both (though I'm not sure this is why I like them so much) contain unforgettable images of breathlessly watchful love and care -- images created by blokes who both got themselves disgracefully wasted on a regular basis, and therefore, when thus wasted, quite incapable of looking after an unconscious sloth, never mind a child or a woman or the world.

Boys.

*Shakes head sadly*

The poems in question are here and here.

The second one in particular will cool as well as calm you down. Can't do better than linking you to these by way of wishing youse all a happy, and less hot, new year.

Stormy weather

I don't mind rain and I really like electrical storms, but wind I can take or leave.

They did say something on the car radio this afternoon about gale warnings for the southern coast, but they didn't mention my quiet little old suburb. Yet here I am, late-ish at night, listening to the gate rattle and the roof creak, and the ceiling and the chimneys making ominous and unexplained noises, and the wind yowling through the trees, and big gusts hitting the house with an intermittent whump like an explosion.

I'm frightened out of my gourd, frankly. And I don't even quite know what it is I'm scared of. But it's quite comforting to watch the two wind-spooked tortoiseshells thundering up and down the passage with their ears back.

The paradox of global warming

Thus far, it's been so unseasonably warm for May that I've hardly had to have the heating on at all.

Rain

Last night as it got dark I was out driving, with a good view of a pearly, opalescent skyscape full of palest blues and creams and greys with a few streaks of pink and gold. It was a late summer sky, not an early winter one, and even as late as Anzac Day the air was warm in a way you'd expect of March, not April.

But this morning the sky is a uniform if slightly fluffy grey, and I was woken by the steady patter and hiss of rain on the corrugated-iron roof and tyres on the wet road outside my window. It's not big freaky flash-flooding hailstones-in-the-gutter rain, either, like the storm last autumn that ended up running in sheets down the insides of the bathroom walls and costing me an arm and a leg in home improvements for stormwater management, thereby ensuring that it did not rain again for the rest of the year.

Nope -- this is lovely gentle normal rain, little rain, the kind I think they're talking about in 'Westron Wind'.

(Westron Wind, when wilt thou blow,
that the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!)

Every plant in the garden is already sitting up like a grateful dog. And they're saying three days of it.

I suppose I could whinge and moan about not having had the resources (time and money, as usual) to organise a rainwater tank yet, but that's a bit Eeyore-ish even for me.

Meteorological intrusions

Apparently this demented weather pattern we're being subjected to down the nation's central strip is called a tropical intrusion.



This part of the paving in the back yard is not supposed to be under water. God knows what that seeping tobacco-coloured stain is; the mind boggles.




This (colour) photo was taken from under the verandah of Quince (top cafe, Quince; fab toast) in the upscale shopping strip down Unley Road in the genteel well-to-do Adelaide inner suburb of Unley at about one o'clock this afternoon.


We're having an intrusion
A tropical intrusion
The temperature's falling
It's slightly appalling
Cos we're having an intrusion

Friday Mogblogging: Cool Change

Bucketing down

Having practically forgotten what rain looked like, I didn't think to clear out the mush of leaves, unseasonably scorched and fallen, that had been breeding with the last of the bottlebrush litter in the gully-trap, even though I knew a storm was coming.

And that, Reader, was why 10 pm tonight found me sopping wet from head to foot, out in the deluge (sur moi, le deluge) and desperately wading though ankle-deep water on the flooded path to the garden shed, my way lit only by a non-waterproof torch (since the electrical storm had knocked out the power) and the frequent cracking flashes of lightning, to find a shovel to scrape out the muck of ages and let through the water that had flooded and overflowed, backed up down the unrelenting cement path and flooded the garden shed and the garage.

This is an old house and it could have been worse; it could have backed up the toilet as well. It has done so more than once before today. So far there's no sign of such a thing.

I may, of course, be speaking too soon.