The pressure is too high, please deflate the equator
We have been living in the hole. The climate has donnered us this way and that.
How surprising to emerge into the sun this week — and no wind for a few hours.
In recent weeks we have endured an unending scream of north-easterly “beasterly”, then came an ominous jumble of nimbus, stratus and cumulo — cloud of every kind.
The winds started to swirl, sometimes it was even the “besterly westerly”.
The cause of all this is not the infamous cut-off low (COL) pressure storms — they are merely the fitting at the end of the hose.
It is these unexplained high pressure cells which are causing all the trouble.
They have pushed ever south and seem to have formed their own marine unprotected area southeast of East London, drawing in marine moisture from as far as the equator.
Then they grab the little COLS who are busy with their cute little easterly drift on their ancient wavy latitudinal line, hold them down and give them a knuckle corkscrew to the head, 1970s schoolyard bully style, until they weep and bawl.
So by the time Monday came and there was a warning of a second COL, I was all over it on Windy.com.
It was on the move and expected to exit SA somewhere near Gqeberha and Kowie.
But there was that fearsome orange-red dot moving not far from East London, a mere few kilometres actually, and then I got the grils.
What if this thing decided to sho’left, like the one which drilled us with winds of 144km/h this time two years ago? Unannounced, not predicted.
I landed up almost stalking it! From Berea I could see dark grey-black cloud billowing up from the ocean, reaching high in a striking white cumulonimbus.
That was 100% moisture from bottom to top for sure.
By the time I got to the Daily Dispatch building in Beacon Bay, it was spitting.
Move on, move on, I was incanting. But no, I was told by tjoms in Nahoon that rain was smashing down, driven by wind so hard it was coming in under the doors.
At that point, I had posted on our internal reporters news group — sigh, the weather nutter again, was a possible refrain.
I also famously told a former editor rain was coming and he planted cabbages en mass and no rain came. But he is also no longer the editor, so I am clear of that one.
And there it is now. On our vast factory-style roof. Tip tap, dum-dum, then full-on drumming, then that roar!
This is the sound I recall as a kid in 1970 in King Edward Road, Cambridge, when the COL never stopped for six days and former mayor Elsabe Kemp’s piano famously washed down the Nahoon River.
She died this week. Remarkable woman bustin’ down the door of male domination, an ugly barrier that still persists.
Few who lived through that deluge will forget the unbelievable destruction. No wonder we get so “triggered”, to use Millenial-speak, by talk of COLS.
I am aware that many, many of us are spooked by the horrifying days of apartheid.
And this new spectre, climate madness, is perhaps what went through my mind as my daughter and I stood outside the door as the spindrift swirled in our faces under a large overhang.
While many tap away at screens in mindful oblivion, she gets it.
And at that point, our lovely Sam decided to knock off.
Noooo! I yelled as she swept past in a hoodie, carrying a bag. No outer shell, just a normal commute.
She paused for a split moment, and then decided, huis toe!
I watched from the balcony as the tyres of her little car squelched through the streaming layer.
The wind was blowing it uphill and a stain of brown washaway was running in the opposite direction.
Crestfallen, I waited for news. It arrived the next day as she approached me with wide eyes.
Here is how it went. The wipers could barely cope, traffic was backing up at every point, she was drenched but had to keep the aircon on to dry moisture on the windscreen or see nothing.
First disaster: the off-ramp from the N2 to the NEX down at Nahoon. A car had died on the corner and, faced with a large pothole on the right and a skinny bit on the left, everyone was taking the thong.
This meant one wheel on the tar the other in mud! That was sketchy. Now she is feeling it: caught in a deluge in a time of climate chaos.
The NEX was OK, except every now and then there is one pothole as big as the Grosvenor mine-head! And as they were crawling along a giant truck hit a puddle and doused the little sedan in a sheet of water.
Now she is tootling along the NEX at speed, giant tyres rumbling along beside her and blind, utterly blind.
By the time she got home, her husband had to towel her hair and calm her down.
“I should have listened to you saying don’t go,” she said.
That deluge lasted 40 minutes and dropped 40mm to 50mm.
It was a small moment. That monster was merely scraping past having dropped in on the south coast and smashed up the beachfront.
“Bru, Tidy Town’s there has called everyone to the beachfront and they will be picking up all that slasto and laying it down again,” said the irrepressible Dean Knox, our Tidy Towns Buffalo City committee chair.
People, this is a superb project. Yes, it’s weird — would you mind shifting over a little so we can fix that amenity? — but this is where we have arrived, it is our destiny and this is what we have to do or sink into the bog.
It’s not fair, it is pragmatic and smart — when the city puts what is wrong or has been broken back in its place.
Filthy loos now clean, showers that work.
If there is a tour of city amenities brought back to usable condition by Tidy Towns, I will take it with gladness in my heart!
This weekend’s weather looks sublime, especially Saturday — all held in place by five high pressure cells south of us. To far south, get thee back to the equator!
Just don’t look too hard at that low pressure cell approaching Cape Town and pray it is not cut off by the time the storm arrives on Thursday.
Look sharp!