Tag: spring

Boing!

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It does finally feel like Spring is beginning to… well… spring. The sun is out, the flowers are budding, the birds are singing. And – if ever there was a sign that the better weather is on its way – I have chosen today to varnish all the garden furniture, ready for the outdoor season ahead.

Well, all the wooden stuff, anyway.

This is the garden furniture equivalent of turning your central heating off in the UK or ordering braai wood instead of firewood down here in Cape Town.

It should be a day for optimism, happiness and positivity. Sadly though, it’s all up against a soundtrack provided by Edwin Knobhead and his Power Drill Orchestra, because the inept builder next door is now running over a month and a half over his already rather lax schedule.
We’re heading towards 6 months now. What joy.

I’m not saying that it’s loud out there, but even my fancy ANC headphones – that’s Active Noise Cancelling, not the dodgy political party – were being overwhelmed. And they are literally meant to actively cancel out noise.

Which is what there is outside.

And so, job done, and tables and chairs actually looking pretty good, I have legged it back inside. Not that the walls of our house are enough to find peace, but it’s more bearable when you try to overcome it with some loud Nemone on 6 Music while banging out a blog post.

In fact, buoyed by the stuff I have achieved in the garden over the past 24 hours, despite facing such aural adversity, I might even bang out tomorrow’s post while I’m at it.

You can read that tomorrow.

Rubbing it in

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An incoming email from famous neo-classical composer and pianist Ludovico Einaudi:

Spring is coming!
As we reconnect with nature and the world around us, Spring represents a time of looking forward; as we plant the seeds for our year ahead.
To celebrate the changing of the season, I’ve released a collection of songs inspired by the coming of Spring and it’s yours to enjoy at the link below.

And yes, he provided the link as promised. And even a countdown to the Vernal Equinox (not the meteorological one).

The thing is, he’s forgotten all about his Southern Hemisphere listeners here. Spring isn’t coming for us. In fact, if Spring is coming for them up North, we’re headed straight for Autumn. Goodbye sunshine and long summer nights, goodbye crippling heat, goodbye days on the beach, blue skies, and fresh, new growth.

Hello winter storms, roaring fires, copious red wine, and (apparently) disconnecting with nature and the world around me. Oh, and the 2024 Euro Championship.

Of course, those of you who know me will also know that I have no issue with any of this. Because why on earth would I?

Happy Spring (or Autumn) to each and every one of you.

Gloomy

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I mean, we were warned. And that Level 6 warning was upped to a Level 9(!) for the Overberg.

But that was the one of the biggest, wettest storms to hit the Western Cape in the (almost) 20 years that I have lived here. Cape Town was bad (really bad), but a bit further south and east was worse.

Bredasdorp is completely cut off, as are Struisbaai, Arniston and Elim. But that doesn’t make a lot of difference, given that Cape Town to Caledon seems to be impossibly impassable as well. We were planning to go out to Agulhas this coming weekend, but now that all clearly depends on how quickly stuff drains down there.

The N2 has disappeared a bit at Bot River.

The road to Struisbaai

The road to Bredasdorp

Even the alternative routes around these problem areas are closed. Stormsvlei, Napier, Stanford – all no through roads at the moment.

Nearer home, as the weather gradually began to improve, we headed down to the V&A Waterfront, where I took this in the somewhat gloomy light.

No Galaxy A33 5G here. This was taken with an actual camera.

Sunshine tomorrow, we are told. We need it.

Incoming (Volume 17)

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Today is lovely. Blue skies, slight breeze, swallows swooping up above.

But remember how I predicted the end of winter about 5 weeks ago? In retrospect, that was funny because it’s been crap weather ever since. And I then said something of the lines of:

Actually, we want spring to come at the normal time, which is probably about a month from now. Because while the dams might be nice and full (99.6% this week, down from 100.4% last week, to be exact), we need them to be like that in the middle of September too, when spring should start.

Well, we’re there now, the dams are still full, and while there are a few signs that Spring is on the way, Winter is going to have one (last?) blast at us this weekend, but weirdly, in a Summery kind of way.

There’s a cut-off low expected from tomorrow through until Monday. More often seen in warmer months (which this is not), cut-off lows are characterised in the Western Cape by gale force South Easterly winds and heaps (and heaps) of rain. Experts will tell you that water is not known for its heaping properties, so if the rain is making heaps, you know that there’s a lot of it.

People in the know have been bouncing around numbers like 100mm and 90kph for the precipitation and the gusting winds. Those are fairly significant numbers at any time, but especially when our local ground is already saturated from a seemingly endless winter and our local trees have been battered very recently.

Will that be it then, though? Winter weather-wise? Well, while* there’s nothing nasty in the immediate aftermath of this long weekend’s fun and games:

You’d be hard-pushed to suggest that an average high of 20 would constitute a definite return of Spring to Cape Town.

But at least there’s the sight of a yellow blob each day from Tuesday onwards.

Maybe… just maybe… warmer times are ahead.

* argh! accidental alliteration. awkward.

Not yet, please

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The weather has turned in Cape Town, and after a long, wet, cold winter, it would seem that spring is on its way. This oak tree in Constantia certainly thought so yesterday:

The trouble is – and hear me out on this one – we don’t really want it to be spring just yet.

[Capetonian people arrive en masse Chez 6000 with pitchforks and flaming torches]

No. Actually, we want spring to come at the normal time, which is probably about a month from now. Because while the dams might be nice and full (99.6% this week, down from 100.4% last week, to be exact), we need them to be like that in the middle of September too, when spring should start.
And if there’s going to be no more decent rain, that isn’t going to happen.

Also, it’s no secret that when it doesn’t rain, Capetonians use more water, so there will be a compound reduction of the amount of stored water we have going into what we’re told will be a long, hot dry summer.

Of course, this is just what climatologists and meteorologists are telling us, using their years and years of collective training and education, their cutting-edge computing models, and their interactions and collaboration with experts around the world.

You might well hear something different from your mate Keith, who has read something on Facebook. And we must thank Keith for taking some time out to share his thoughts on this, busy as he is also being an expert on Eurasian geopolitics, the New World Order paedophile network, cryptocurrency, and the reasons why Elon Musk is a “great guy”.

But I digress… often.

All I’m saying is that while it’d lovely to have a bit of nice weather right now, starting spring this early will have unpleasant knock-on effects in March and April. And I know that might seem a long way off at the moment, but we’ll look back on this post once we get there’re in the midst of heatwaves and water restrictions, just so I can say I told you so*.

* I won’t do that**

** OK, I might do that