To Do list on this Blue Moon New Year's Eve

TO DO (in order of importance)

Pull oneself together

Accept the fact that it's going to be 41 degrees today and suck it up; everybody's hot

Finish and file weekly book reviews column

Make Eton Mess for fourteen (go out in the heat and buy more eggs because one is an idiot and forgot; make meringues; hull, slice and Kirsch-macerate strawberries; whip cream)

Work out appropriate bowls and plastic containers for transportation and serving of said Mess

Run a load of washing including half of tonight's outfit

Check the rest of tonight's outfit, bearing in mind that there's going to be a cool change in the middle of the event which may involve the hand-washing of a pashmina, and do necessary ironing etc

Cover up the lemon tree or all the lemons and leaves will get scorched

Call father for weekly yarn

Wonder, given the full-on car park rage hissy fit at 8.23 am (see 'forgot eggs', above), what sort of state one will be in by the end of tonight's six-hour* dinner
*well, it was last year


Meditate on art, age and womanhood. Here's Joni Mitchell at around 50, no backup (and almost no makeup), singing about a blue moon, which is what it is tonight: the second full moon in a single calendar month. 'Night Ride Home' is a happy love song, which for Joni is a blue moon event. Look at the length of her fingers, and the expression on the face of the little dude watching her right at the end.

And a very happy New Year to all.

Fire

The forecast maximum temperature for Adelaide today is 42 degrees. South Australia is divided into fifteen 'districts' and the fire warning for two of them is classified as 'Severe'. For five more, it's 'Extreme'. And for the remaining eight, it's 'Catastrophic'.

This new classification system was activated for the first time in the heatwave of mid-November when my tiny home town came under threat. And it was very worrying to see interviews afterwards with people in other parts of rural South Australia who complained 'Oh but it wasn't classed "catastrophic" here so we thought it would be all right.' Others complained that they had been classified as 'catastrophic' -- and at the last minute, too! "They" had kept changing the classification! -- and yet there had been no fire. They were outraged that their lives had been, however briefly, disrupted.

*Moans*

Human nature being what it is, there are a few things about this that are very worrying. One is the dependence mentality that seems already to be setting in, the expectation that there will be full correlation between what's predicted and warned and what actually happens, and that, somehow, magically, "they" should and will fix it all. Another is the apparent ignorance (and I know for a fact that country people are not ignorant about this, so there is clearly some other psychological gremlin present) about the unpredictability of fire conditions and their aptness to change and turn on a sixpence.

And maybe the most dangerous is that suggestion that if the danger is not officially classified 'catastrophic' (code for 'If there's a fire, get out of your house to safety: you can't save it and we can't save you') then there is no danger at all and it's safe to stay home and do nothing. The lure of the false binary is strong, Grasshopper, but in this instance it could lead to unthinkably tragic consequences. If I were the state government I'd be fast-tracking the use of the education department to disseminate clear thinking about fire, warnings, and the limited power to predict and fight fires of the state authorities -- about which, ironically, country people are usually all too sceptical.

From the Bureau of Meteorology

FIRE WEATHER WARNING FOR SOUTH AUSTRALIA
Issued at 6:55 am CDT on Thursday, 19 November 2009.

Thursday, 19 November 2009 is forecast to be very hot and dry for all of South Australia. Fresh to strong north to northwest winds over the west of the state, will shift fresh southwesterly with a change reaching Ceduna mid afternoon and a line Tarcoola to Adelaide around midnight.

Catastrophic Fire Danger [100+] is forecast for the West Coast, Eastern Eyre Peninsula and Lower Eyre Peninsula Total Fire Ban districts.

Extreme Fire Danger [75-99] is forecast for the Northwest Pastoral and Flinders Total Fire Ban districts.

Severe Fire Danger [50-74] is forecast for the Mid North Total Fire Ban district.

The Country Fire Service advises that fires burning under these conditions are likely to be fast moving, unpredictable and uncontrollable. You should action your Bushfire Survival Plan now.

The forecast maximum temperature for Adelaide today is 43 degrees. Ceduna and Leigh Creek are expecting 45, Port Augusta 47.

Yesterday was the first day on which the new system of identifying fire danger in South Australia made use of the category Catastrophic. 'Catastrophic', aka 'Code Red', basically means 'Leave now, flee, run for your lives.' One of the regions listed under this red code is Lower Eyre Peninsula, the site of an uncontrollable bushfire in January 2005, a fire in which nine people died and dozens more were rendered homeless, penniless, and/or permanently damaged in some other way. The events of the fire had a long tail of depression, PTSD and suicide.

On the news last night they were interviewing people from the affected rural areas. Obviously the TV station (Seven, I think) edited their footage to suit their own purposes, and who knows what agendas lurk in the hearts of producers of commercial TV news, but everyone whose interview made it to the screen responded with that combination of steely and laconic that I remember so well from having grown up with it, in a slightly (but only slightly) kinder, gentler part of rural South Australia. (UPDATE: here, in fact, where the only SA bushfire of the day so far has broken out two paddocks across from the house I grew up in. Fark.)

Two fortyish, weatherbeaten male farmers said they wouldn't leave unless there was an actual fire. A young woman with kids was cross that the schools had been closed, not because it meant she had the kids at home (most country people regard that as an advantage; they can help with the work) but because she felt her kids were unnecessarily missing out on a precious day of education. One dear old hatted dude in the pub, a man of at least 80 and probably older, scorned the idea of leaving. 'There's no fire. And,' he added, looking the camera in the eye, 'I wouldn't be scared or worried if there was.' It was very obvious that he didn't necessarily mean he thought he was safe. Country people live with death on a daily basis and learn to look it in the eye.

My guess is that in the endless quest for ratings the station was pandering to the prejudices of urban viewers by trying to make country people look too stupid to come in out of the rain. If so, it sort of backfired; they looked at least as brave as they looked silly. I wasn't sure whether to admire them or scream at them. But I guess those two things aren't mutually exclusive.




The Curramulka fire started about a mile back over where my right shoulder would have been when I took this photo, which faces south. The paddock you can see to the right of the tree in the middle of the picture would have been one of the first to burn. My childhood home is a couple of hundred metres down this road on the left. The township is down where you can see the land dipping into a hollow like a saucer or a nest, about 5 km south of here.

The fire passed by very close to the town and headed south-east. It's now been contained, but about an hour ago there was supposed to be a wind change that might push it back towards the town along a projected path that would lead it directly towards the cemetery where my great-grandparents and great-great grandparents are buried. If those gravestones are damaged my father is going to be very seriously dark.

UPDATE UPDATE, 10.30 pm: Yep, here we go; the cemetery and further north what used to be our family farm are smack in the middle of this danger area. I've been watching that dry lightning in the western sky across the gulf ever since it got dark.

In December 1869, great-great-granpappy got forced over the cliff and into the sea with his son John and the horse and cart by a bushfire that unbeknownst to them until hours later had already killed the shepherd, the shepherd's son and over a thousand sheep. G-G-Granpa and his boy trod water while bits of burning debris rained down on them, along this same stretch of coast that's now under threat again, in the same bay where I learned to swim. The fire will probably pass over all four of their graves, and they'll be shaking their heads skulls and saying Oh great, here we go again.

This region is family heartland. Not happy.

UPDATE #3, midnight:

Okay, that was scary.

It's still filthy hot here, oven-hot, so I got in the car and drove the ten minutes to the same beach where the boy from the Bruce Springsteen song held his girl so sadly while the sun set into the sea and the kids rode the water slide and the merry-go-round a couple of nights ago. It's another Springsteen night tonight, the sea roaring and shadowy couples in shorts and sundresses lined up in cars along the edge of the dunes or trailing down to the beach with ice creams and tinnies.

I'd thought I might be able to see some sort of glow from the fire across the gulf. But I wasn't prepared for the actual line of golden, flickering flames where my and my father's and his father's and his father's childhood beaches were on fire in the dark, due west across the water. A few miles south of the fire I could see the faint lights of a town that must have been Port Vincent, now quite a big town, full of apprehensive people all still up with the lights on, thinking about what to do: full of women alone, still up, still dressed, making cups of coffee and cups of tea, checking on the kids, watching the phone while their blokes were out at the fire, waiting for their blokes to come home.

I pulled up on the esplanade and wound down the car window. Under the heavy complicated smell of the incoming tide and the wind in the pines and the cars along the foreshore and the warm spitty rain hitting the hot road in tiny drops and steaming, under all that, there was the faintest note of smoke.

HEAT Heat

I'm seeing a lot of complaining from east of the border about how hot it is. Now the Victorians just aren't used to sunshine and you have to feel sorry for the poor sausages, but can I just say that since Sunday the maximum temperatures in Adelaide have been 35, 37, 37 and 39, with today, tomorrow and both days on the weekend forecast to go to or above 39. Which will make it by far the longest November heatwave in Adelaide on record. How Emergency Services plan to deploy themselves for the several hours on Saturday morning when the iconic John Martin's Christmas Pageant and the International Three-Day-Event are both on is anybody's guess. Organisers have refused to cancel either event and it could end up a Guernica of dead horses and passed-out Santas FATHER CHRISTMASES DAMMIT.

If the SA Government had actually done something decisive and productive about water catchment and management seven years ago when they first got into office, and if the Eastern States had not conspired to kill the river out of greed, and if we hadn't watched gigalitres of rainfall go to waste all winter, and if one out of two Adelaideans were not openly flouting the water restrictions and admitting as much to journalists from the Advertiser, I might feel less enraged about watching the garden die.

If we're getting February weather in early November, it's likely that February will be beyond endurance. I thought last year, around the time of the fires when the temps got up to 47 degrees, that we were in unchartered waters, but it looks as if this summer is going to be, like, unchartereder.

If cats really were as intelligent as they are supposed to be, then there would not be two tortoiseshells stretched out with feline expressions of reproachful suffering on the hottest room in the house, where there is no aircon and no insulation in that part of the roof, instead of hot-pawing it to the study or the bedroom and bunking down there for the duration.

And if it's just going to stay at 39 degrees for the rest of my life, then I'm not at all sure how long the rest of my life is going to be.

The cake is in the oven

As threatened, I have made Deborah Strange Land's family's traditional Christmas cake, and it is in the oven.

Deborah has beautiful photos of hers here so I didn't take bother to take any pictures of mine (particularly since my brown-paper wrapping on the cake tin looks like the work of a drunken three-year-old) except right at the beginning when the raisins, currants, sultanas, dates and glacé cherries were marinating in the brandy in the big red pottery bowl that S and P gave me one Christmas (I think) after I had admired theirs.




It's an essential part of the recipe at this in-the-oven point that you contact your female nearest and dearest to say that your Christmas cake is in the oven and you are thinking of them. And so, dear girly blogfriends, I am. (And any of the blokes what are interested, too; this may not be a permissible variant, but I'm fairly sure that at least half the men who read this blog are better cooks than I am, apart from anything else.)

Yesterday there was a good omen when I grabbed up a pair of very cheap loose light white cotton trousers from India via K-Mart, not even bothering to try them on, on a whim on my way to the checkout (the single hardest-to-find item in the whole Christmas cake shopping list? Brown wrapping paper), only to discover, when I arrived home, two things:

(1) We in Adders are set for the worst November heatwave on record, starting at 35 degrees on Sunday and up to 37 on Monday, which will last all week and possibly go on longer than that, and the white trousers (which fit perfectly and don't even need to be taken up) are the perfect garment for lying round the house whingeing and moaning in; and

(2) an acceptable alternative to almond paste/marzipan, which is the traditional undercoat for Christmas cake decoration but which makes many people gag, is a thing called Rolled Fondant that I found in Rose Levy Berenbaum's The Cake Bible, the instructions for which include a directive to wear all-white clothes while you're making it, because a single stray thread can discolour the fondant.

So, double serendipity. Sweet.

There is one thing very wrong with this recipe, though. Either Grandma Strange Land or Deborah herself has inexplicably left the kitteh hair out of the list of ingredients.

That has been remedied.

On weather, fear and reading

The Weatherpixie in the sidebar there, at this moment anyway, is telling me that at Adelaide Airport, 20 minutes south of here, there is currently a totally clear blue sky and the sun is shining brightly with his whole face. Yet chez moi all is dark and gloomy both inside and out. Thunder rumbles roll past in waves. Whistling and pattering, not unlike the whistling and pattering in the Wild Wood in The Wind in the Willows, is coming from outside, and I do so hope it's just the irritating wind and the small rain. It's the sort of day that makes you think you should go straight back to bed and stay there, but if I did that I'd have to finish reading my current bedside book, the new Val McDermid, and that's much much scarier than any scary weather.

My other fear is that the next book in that pile, the new Kathy Reichs (bedtime reading is strictly non-work-related), is going to continue the downward slide that began two or three books in from her debut when her publishers (or so I surmise; maybe her agent too) first told her to dumb down the science, bland out the prose and ramp up the lerve story, which is getting INCREDIBLY TEDIOUS. It's probably too much to think she might have defied them, at this level of success, and write however she damn pleases, the way she did when she first started. But we live in hope.

Now they tell me

The Flood Warning for Adders that freaked me out last night appears to have been downgraded to a Flood Watch. I wish I'd known that before I spent an hour outside in the cold this morning with shovels and trowels and garden gloves, climbing ladders and cleaning out gutters and clearing gully traps and digging drainage channels and improvising sandbags, here in this low-lying part of town where the stormwater floods straight down my concrete driveway from the road in sheets.

Covered in the mud and glop of ages but virtuous and warmed up from the exertion, am on way to shower before hitting the road to the hospital to visit Papa Cat. Who is much better: not as serious as we feared.

Enough already

The first three weeks of June are my least favourite time of year. It's officially winter, it's got seriously cold, and the days are still getting shorter. I hang out for the solstice and when it arrives I make mulled wine to celebrate. Quite a lot of mulled wine.

In the meantime the Weatherpixie over there on the right says more rain and so does the Bureau of Meteorology. Apparently it's going to stop for a few minutes tomorrow and Thursday and then it's going to start again.

Yes, of course the rain is a blessing, particularly here in Adelaide where a matter of weeks ago we were staring straight down the barrel of the gun and the death of a city looked like a real possibility. For the people down at the Lower Lakes and the Murray Mouth I think it is already too late (ask the Ngarrindjeri people about that), but here in the city and out in the country it's filling the creeks and the rivers, the reservoirs and the tanks and the dams. It's saving the gardens. People's lawns are growing back unbidden. Animals are fat and happy. Paddocks will soon be covered in the soft green fur of incipient wheat and barley. You don't get that from occasional little gentle drippy rain, you get it from the regular roaring, thundering floods of the kind that washed away half my back yard last night when the heavens opened and terrified the cats out of their little furry minds.

Now whether it's my advancing age and concomitant decrepitude, or the fact that I don't trust this house and its outbuildings not to leak or indeed fall down or blow away, or the fact that the phrase 'extreme weather events' seems to describe accurately what's been happening for the last few years, or more nebulous and less tangible anxieties being projected onto the weather, or some hideous combination of all those things, is something of which I can't be sure.

But there's one thing I'm completely sure of. I really, really need it to stop raining. Just for a week or so. Please.

Three colours: red

The forecast says that late tomorrow morning it will start to rain and won't stop for a week, so that's my Thursday morning taken care of: up on the ladder scooping the mixed organic muck of eons out of such gutters as I can reach without actually risking my life. Today was a perfect Adelaide autumn day: still and sunny, with high creamy-bluey slightly cloudy sky and the earth still so warm you wonder whether you should chuck in one more go of Dynamic Lifter for the hell of it before winter sets in.

But by the time the rain clears we will be on the cusp of May, the air and the earth a week colder, the days a week darker and more closed-in. So today was probably the last of those soft, bright autumn days for the year.

Still, there are compensations, like the colours of autumn as it moves into winter: the vine doing its annual flashy thing,




lamb shanks,




and happy rugged-up cats.

Adelaide heatwave: day 4

Last night I went out to dinner with my regular dinner-having crew. We ate at a Greek place in Glenelg (old beachside suburb), so after we left at about ten pm I took a detour down to the beach to see who was still out and about on a weeknight, cooling down. There were hundreds of people on Jetty Road and down towards the beach, including lots of kids, all in shorts and sarongs and thongs (the foot kind; I wouldn't know about the other), many of them queuing at the ice-cream shops, all of which were open. The pub was heaving. I had to drive at walking pace for about a kilometre to get out of there.

This morning I got groggily out of bed and staggered down to the baking back half of the house, and this was the sight that greeted my eyes:



She's waiting for me to get up, tip a bucket of water into it and turn it on, which I immediately did. (This should answer Skepticlawyer's question a few posts back about how the cats are coping.)

Early in the afternoon I went outside and flung a large, ultra-lightweight cream-coloured cat rug over the lemon tree to try to stop the leaves scorching and shrivelling any more than they already have. The minute I got into the sun I could feel the skin burning on my face and arms.

Mindful of the 14 old people who died suddenly at home over a twelve-hour stretch in Adelaide yesterday, I rang my dad this morning to see how he was and to discuss the arrangements for Sunday, which is his 82nd birthday. 'I'm fine,' he said. 'I'm getting quite used to this heat. In fact, I rather like it.' I had a sudden flashback to his 80th birthday dinner, at which he sat back expansively over a plate sparsely scattered with cake crumbs, drained the last of his champagne, and said 'Right. Now I'm striking out for 85.'

Pollyanna and her half-full glass have a shower

Here's an unforeseen advantage of temperatures in the mid-forties: free solar heating!

Just had a lovely refreshing yet non-heart-stoppingly-cold shower in pleasantly cool-to-lukewarm water that ran maybe fifteen or twenty degrees below body temperature for the whole six minutes I was under the shower. Without burning any gas at all.

Gecko Central: life keeps on happening

Last night late I went outside with the big torch to see if my frantic watering of the lemon tree (after falling into an exhausted early-evening sleep under the aircon in my bedroom and waking just in time to do what my father calls 'throwing some water around' in the tiny window the water restrictions allow, just before dark) had revived it at all. As I'd peered at it in the half-light of dusk (crepuscular, it was) I could half-see that many leaves had been burned to a crisp and feared for the actual life of the tree.

Here's what I found a few hours later, lolloping about in whatever moisture remained, six or seven feet off the ground:

'Becoming milder during the evening'

... says today's Adelaide weather forecast. Yesterday the temperature got up to 41.3 degrees, some time in the early afternoon, and most of that heat is still swirling around in my high old roof. Approximate time this morning at which it began to feel hotter outside than inside and I closed all the doors and windows again accordingly: 7.40 am.

Roll on the evening.

Rain dance

What my dear and long-departed paternal grandfather used to call the Weather Baroo has been forecasting rain in these parts for several days now, but thus far the sky has declined to put its money where its mouth is.

So this morning saw me outside with the garden hose, since it's Wednesday and it's before 9 am and I live in an odd-numbered house and I neglected to water the garden the last time I was allowed to (last Sunday) because I was busy and the Weather Baroo had told me I wouldn't need to.

The poor parched plants needed a serious soaking, especially the lemon tree which is one thirsty dude, so there was considerable expenditure of both time and money, the former in particular being in crucially short supply around here at the moment. As for the money, the water people seem to be behaving the same way as Telstra; as the use of water and of landlines gets less and less, they hike up the infrastructure charges more and more, so although you're being incredibly and increasingly frugal in your use of necessary services, your bills stay roughly the same. It's a version of the law of diminishing returns.

So anyway, after seriously soaking the garden, packing up the hose and coming inside, I went out again five minutes later for something else and there it was, if not actually bucketing down then certainly having a good substantial spit. I can't always make it rain by hanging out the washing or washing the car, but watering the garden is a lay-down misère.

Is this family working?

During the lead story on tonight's 7.30 Report about the extensive recent storm damage in south-east Queensland and the high likelihood of more, the Prime Minister and the Treasurer both took advantage of the mics under their noses to say the word 'families' as often as possible, as in 'providing help for families'.

Any visitor to these shores idly watching the teeve in his or her hotel room could be excused for thinking that the single and the childless were expected to sod off and fix their own roofs, re-wire their own houses and clean up all the tree branches and sinister floating typhoid-harbouring garbage themselves. The homeless, of course, are not burdened with roofs and therefore require no attention either.