Country Squire

ROB INGRAM BURNS UP AS HE MAKES A CASE THAT GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL.

THE CHOSEN ONE was back before she’d even left the other day. I raised an eyebrow. “Oven mitt,” she said. “Why on earth would you take a oven mitt to town?” I asked. “Car door handle,” she explained. A minute later she was back for the other oven mitt. “Steering wheel,” she said. “Hot as hell.” There are people out here who would swear on the Old Testament that there’s no such thing as global warming, who are nevertheless driving around grasping their steering wheels with padded mitts decorated with red chilli peppers. I’m not suggesting for a moment that The Chosen One is one of these, but her plight does suggest a degree of circumstantial evidence that our summers are getting hotter. Even our local radio station has reinforced this suspicion. The grooviest aspect of our radio station is its rich thread of retro. When Mario Lanza or Frankie Laine aren’t serenading us in the supermarket, we might get to leapfrog to something as contemporary as Nat King Cole… and it was Nat who grabbed my attention the other day. “Roll out those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer… those days of soda and pretzels and beer,” crooned Nat. My God, I thought, was summer really like that? Today, it’s about hopping on one thong across a thermonuclear bitumen car park, not being able to find a parking spot within a bus ride of the beach and sandwiches tasting of Aerogard. It’s the season of B-52 blowflies, blood-thirsty mosquitoes, brown snakes and bluebottles. Nat trilled about the delights of heading off to the beach to watch the girls in their bikinis, but summer today is no longer a season of glamour. We go to the beach to watch people in giggle hats with a string under their chins, people the colour of beetroot with zinc on their noses. When Nat went to the beach with soda and pretzels and beer, people were fit and tanned. Today, we’ve learned that if we smother ourselves with sticky sunblock and lie on the sand we can look like uncooked chicken schnitzels. And then there’s perhaps the most tragic misconception the Australian man can make: the belief that the Speedos he got for his 70th birthday will last him well into obesity. Is it just me who wonders whatever happened to the carefree days of summer? Why did we have to complicate the slow, lazy simplicity of those childhood summers? I’m feeling the need to write a song that captures the new summer. The hazy, craziness of total fire bans, drought, dehydration and power outages. Even postponed barbecues — now there’s a real natural disaster. Extra drink breaks at the cricket, rescheduled matches at the tennis, and warm beer. Forget the soda and pretzels. Last year we had a day when it reached 44°C. It created its own firestorm and burned out 55,000 hectares of surrounding farmland. Hazy and crazy, yes… but lazy, I don’t think so. Sweet, sleepy warmth of summer nights, gazing at the distant lights. Now it’s lying awake listening to the drone of the aircon and calculating the number of kilowatts per dollar it’s chewing up. Even Jerry Keller’s Here Comes Summer doesn’t really reflect my summers any more… “Well school’s not bad but summer’s better, It gives me more time to see my girl; Walks through the park ‘neath the shiny moon, When we kiss she makes my flat-top curl.” I rest my case.

IS IT JUST ME WHO WONDERS WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE CAREFREE DAYS OF SUMMER?