Turning up the heat on the good ol’ days

HOT, innit? How’s that polar vortex we were all complaining about not so long back looking now?

Still, it gives us something to talk about and there’s nothing like a run of hot days and furnace-like winds to kick-start a conversation about the “good old days”.

We’d be breaking a long-held tradition if we failed to point out – assuming we can raise the energy to actually point once the mercury sails past that ghastly 40 mark – how we’ve gone soft in our old age.

Hot? Never had it so good, the oldies (me included) cluck.

I too remember sweating my way through sleepless nights with wet towels hung in front of groaning old fans.

I remember two-hour bus trips home from school (that’s when the old bus DIDN”T boil) with our heads hung out the windows in a forlorn attempt to stave off certain suffocation.

I also have memories of mid-summer car trips jammed between my lanky brothers in the back seat, where the vinyl – no poncy seat covers in my day, no siree – more resembled a hotplate waiting to turn skin to molten lava.

Remember melting into a near-comatose state of lethargy in stifling, airless demountable classrooms?

Lamb-marking on days so scorching you would cheerfully swap places with the hapless little boy lamb just for the chance to lie down?

No air-conditioning then, my young whipper snappers.

And here’s the rub: It was bloody awful then and it’s bloody awful now.

Just because I sleep and wake up in an airconditioned house, drive to and from air-conditioned offices and shops in my air-conditioned car, doesn’t mean I can’t gripe along with the rest of the population when Mother Nature forces us to endure obscene 40 plus temperatures. Good old days my swollen, sweaty foot. We grizzled just as much then as we do now. The fact that we survived without the luxurious optional extra of air-conditioning doesn’t make me feel the least bit guilty for making life a little easier now that we have the technology.

If the nostalgic among us want to martyr themselves to prove a point, go right ahead and turn off the air-conditioning.

While they’re at it, they might want to drag out the horse and buggy.

Of course, the upside of this weather is that we’ve all had something to talk about.

With such scintillating opening lines as “Jeez, hot isn’t it?” and the ridiculous “Hot enough for ya?” how could I miss the opportunity for some witty repartee with fellow heat-haters?

And I’ve discovered through some of these exchanges that heatwave stories tend to be somewhat akin to fishing tales.

No matter how hot it was under your pergola, someone else’s backyard will nudge you out by half a degree. Same goes for towns. Orange reached 37, huh? Pffft. Wimps. We beat ‘em by five whole degrees on Wednesday – and that was in the waterbag in the shade.

Is the world getting hotter? More than likely. Are we getting softer? Probably.

But for this little mountain lassie, when the mercury nudges 35, any increase is simply academic.

The novelty factor of Facebook one-upmanship and posts about how hot the car said it was lasts only so long.

But this week’s “heatwave” (and some would argue that’s a misnomer – given it’s Australia, it’s January and it’s, well, summer) has put at least one argument in our household on ice for a while.

My husband, The Oracle, has already this season pumped enough chemical substance into our pool to make the Essendon Bombers envious, and is constantly threatening to “bulldoze the bloody thing in” while I’m not looking.

This week? Not so much. And after that, over my dead, sweaty body.

I’ve spent much of this week justifying the transfer of my home office to the shallow end of the pool (backyard, not gene) without breaching a serious risk assessment regarding technology and water. So far so good, and another reason the encumbrance of maintaining the pool is a burden I’m happy to let my husband bear.

Incessant coverage of the weather just makes me hotter – so I don’t want to listen to any more forecasts unless they give me a solid gold, water tight, money back guarantee that this weekend will be more bearable, and the wind won’t feel like the breath of a dragon.

Because, to quote a former colleague of mine: Stick a fork in us – we’re done.

No matter how hot it was under your pergola, someone else’s backyard will nudge you out by half a degree.