No Summer for Melbourne this Year

It looks like for Melbourne, if not for all of Victoria, the coming months, formerly known as “summer,” have been relabelled. If we are to take heed of what is being communicated through various media platforms, it seems other expressions have replaced the use of “summer” to define the season that officially starts on December 1^st.

In particular, I have noticed Craig Lapsley, Victoria’s Emergency Services Commissioner, in his almost weekly appearance on Melbourne television, referring the approaching months as “our fire season” or “our bushfire season.”  I can’t recall him ever using the word, “summer.” In one recent media statement, he refers to “our traditional fire period of January and February” By “traditional,” I wonder if he means “traditional” in the way plum puddings and overcrowded Torquay surf shops are at this time of the year?

If it is not the “fire season” that has come to signify the months from December to February, then it’s another name just as alarming.  With water catchment levels dropping, recent weather maps showing that El Nino is starting to look like 'super El Nino', and the Bureau of Meteorology predicting present dry conditions to continue, we have the “drought season”.

In addition, with the UV index once tracking higher than the volume control on Metallica’s Kirk Hammett’s guitar amp, we are also getting into the “high UV season,” or maybe it's the “hat season” or the “50+ sunscreen season.”

And let’s not forget it is also the “cricket season.”

I just wonder what has happened to those simpler “lazy hazy days of summer” that Nat King Cole once crooned about … “Those days of soda and pretzels and beer?”

Paul H