Cold is relative depending on where you live. If I lived in northern Europe or parts of Canada where I know the temperature can drop to many degrees below freezing I probably would find that pretty tough to cope with. Although, having said that I imagine that people who live there are used to it and have the clothing and heating to make life comfortable.

I live in Tasmania which has the coldest winters of all the Australian states. It snows here although not as much as it did a generation ago and not everywhere. It’s mostly in elevated areas. Oatlands, where Naomi used to live, usually sees some snow on the ground in the town at least a couple of times every winter but it soon melts away. The Huon Valley can be cold in winter too. The temperature often drops to minus four or five Celsius at night and there would be days where the daytime temperature would not reach double figures. Here on the northwest coast it doesn’t get quite that cold but winter nights can be chilly and days too sometimes.

How do I feel about that? Well, I don’t mind it. I like autumn and winter. I like seeing the leaves change colour. I love seeing snow on the hills. I used to look forward to it in the Huon Valley. I’m happy to get out my warm jumpers and to have things like stew and Shepherd’s Pie for dinner. The winters here are not unbearably cold and although by September we are looking forward to longer days and warmer temperatures I like that fact that we have four distinct seasons in Tasmania.

Before I lived in Tasmania I lived in South Australia. That is a state where the summers can be very hot. The last summers that David and I lived in Adelaide there were heatwaves where the temperature would rise above forty degrees every day for a week or more at a time. Even at night it wouldn’t drop below thirty. You couldn’t sleep, there were blackouts. I always felt tired and cranky. We didn’t have air conditioning so we’d often go to a shopping mall or the movies to get out of the heat. At home we’d have the curtains drawn and the windows shut all day and only open them up in the evening to get the evening sea breeze. We’d sit on the front porch sometimes till ten at night waiting for the house to cool down enough to go to bed. It was a great relief when winter finally came and we could enjoy some cooler weather. It doesn’t get really cold in winter in Adelaide, in the hilly areas it can be frosty and sometimes it even snows on Mt Lofty near Adelaide. This is an event and people used to rush up there to see it while it lasted.

We could have bought an air conditioner but instead we decided to leave and live in a state with a better climate. Yes, in some respects we were climate refugees although it wasn’t the only reason we left. The climate certainly was a factor in our moving. In the twenty plus years since we left, the summers in Adelaide have become even hotter. They have had days when it has been forty five degrees Celsius. I don’t recall that it ever reached that in the city when we lived there.

So when all is said and done I don’t mind cold weather. I’d rather have cold weather than hot. As I have often said, if you are cold you can put warmer clothing on but if you are hot there is a limit to what you can take off in public.