WELLINGTON ROUNDABOUT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 14, 29 September 1939, Page 24

WELLINGTON ROUNDABOUT

By

Thid

Mainly about the Weather N Wellington the weather has lately merited notice only because it has been consistently fine. It has not been calm and sunny; but it has been sunny, and Wellington has found some cause for conversation in this after a wet and gusty winter. Usually, Wellington weather is more or less ignored. How is it possible to talk about weather when you step inside out of the sun, remark upon its beautiful properties, and find, when you turn to the window for confirmation, that ultra-violet rays have become purple streaming clouds -when you leave home in a glow of cool satisfaction, decide half way to work that you should have

worn your short underpants after all, and become convinced by the time the office is reached that fur coats should come back into fashion and they’ve shut off the central heating too soon? Wellington is like that. A most difficult place. Only Two Winds Up at Kelburn Observatory they stoutly maintain that the wind here blows in only two directions, north and south. Notice they say "the wind," and not "wind" or "a wind." Cook Straits, you see, torture the easterly and westerly winds into northerly and southerly gales which keep even the smoky city fairly clear of dust and bugs. But whatever the Observatory says, Wellington knows better. It

is not long before you learn on which street corners the . wind blows left, and where it rips in from the right. Here you tack into your turn with an anticipatory list to port, there your keel has to butt into a swell on the starboard beam. Just Like The War There’s no sense or security in the Wellington weather. Neither rhyme nor reason; right nor wrong. It’s disloyal, it’s uncertain, it’s revolutionary, it’s exciting, it’s unsettling. It’s merry one moment, mad the next. It’s as inconsistent as a too-much-loved woman, as fickle as the course of a butterfly, as unpredictable as the moods of a lunatic. It is, in fact, very like the war. And that is why I rambled on about the weather when they asked me about the war reaction in Wellington streets. Everybody’s mad but me.