The Weather Report

The weather in Sydney isn't only a bit wild, it's very changeable as well.

At least, that's how the australians justify the fact that their weather reports are always wrong, and even when they're right, they're so incredibly vague that they're neither use nor ornament anyway, you know, like showing an entire continent and wafting their hand over one of the areas and saying "there's going to be some weather here", that sort of thing.

And they can't make up their minds how they feel about the temperatures either; do they want it to be hot or not? Just a bit hot? How hot is hot enough for them? I can't work it out. This morning on the channel 9 breakfast show they were doing the weather and talking about somewhere in Western Australia was going to be 35 degrees today, and they followed this up by saying "that's not bad for the beginning of spring is it?". But then the summer will come and it'll be 32 degrees and they'll be complaining it's going to be another stinker of a day and moaning about how there's no water in the reservoirs and half their backyard is on fire like some enormous barbeque. You just can't please the buggers and anyway, they should try 6 degrees in the day and see how they like that.

In Darwin, the temperature has been 33 degrees almost every day since we got here in January; it's just the humidity that changes. It must be pretty boring knowing it's going to be 33 degrees every day, I mean, you'd never get a nice surprise would you?

In Perth, the winter days are often rainy but the temperature doesn't ever seem to get below 17 degrees. In Adelaide, the winter gets almost as cold as Melbourne's, but the summer days can soar to 40 degrees out of nowhere and the temperatures swing about wildly, so that you might get five days where the temperature goes 22, 40, 16, 25, 40.

The weather in Melbourne stinks and the people who live there complain of "four seasons in a day", which means it can start off hot and sunny and turn to hailstones by midday, which is why Ramsay Street often looks wet.

In Sydney today we had a forecast of 28 degrees and sunshine but this morning they revised that to 28 degrees with rain showers and by 2pm we were sitting in bright sunshine on the beach at Camp Cove watching the city cop an enormous electrical storm (see the photo). Then when I went to the kiosk to get some drinks I heard on the radio that they were putting out an emergency warning for a severe thunderstorm and gale-force winds so we made a run for it and had to drive through lightening and enormous hailstones before emerging into bright sunlight and temperatures that had lifted again, all within the space of a few kilometers.

When I think of the flak Michael Fish got after failing to predict the 1989 storms, the guys out here are getting away with murder.