Yes, yes, let’s talk about the weather

Just last week, people were complaining about the weather. We had a slow start to summer, with unusually cool and rainy weather. Then, we suddenly had a hot and sunny day. Did the complaints end? Well…

Winter overstayed its welcome. Not even a week ago, MetService Meteorologist Georgina Griffiths said winter was running about six weeks late:

“We started winter really late. It was beautiful autumn and it carried on sunny… It was dry and warm and we had the warmest June ever, nationally. We went into winter late and it just seems we are going to exit winter late."

Yes, well, maybe so. But once we had more than one day of warmer temperatures, people naturally forgot all about that and started complaining about the heat. Just no pleasing some people—apart from me, of course, because I quite like sunny, hot weather (as long as I can stay inside in air conditioning, of course…).

I was one of those people who complained about the extended winter, but in a mostly snarky way—I was having a bit of fun. But there were actual implications to the ongoing cool weather, something I alluded to in my only blog post about the recent bad weather.

Oh, well, it’s all pretty harmless, really. Maybe it gives people something to complain about without being all negative about things that actually matter.

But, I really do like hot summer days.

Footnote: The title of this post is somewhat oblique, quoting a line from the prologue to “How Beautifully Blue the Sky”, a song from Act I of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. There’s a video of that song on YouTube that isn’t bad version, despite the poor video quality (the relevant line is about 32 seconds in). I’m familiar with it because in fifth grade (age 10-11) I was moved to the advanced-level reading class, where we studied Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, so I wanted to know more. We also studied Macbeth, which made me want to read more Shakespeare. And, I did.

The lesson here is that one never knows where educating a child may lead: It may even lead to that child growing up, remembering what he learned as a child, and then referring back to it in a blog post about the weather.

Education matters much more than the weather.