PicoBlog

Summertime, and the living is easy.
Fish are jumping, and the cotton is high.
Oh, your daddy's rich, and your ma is good-looking.
So, hush, little baby, don't you cry.

Here we are. The days many of us look forward to for months.

The days when we lose track of what day it is. Is it rubbish day? Better check, we’ve got a lot of rubbish. Nope, three more days.

So we stay up late and we get up late, kind of like Covid. The days pass, and nothing much really happens - a bit of cricket, moaning about the weather, earthquakes near nuclear reactors, recipes for leftover ham, genocide, that sort of thing.

What’s the difference between those things above? Which one is not like the others? One we have done something about, and not just moaned?

The answer is Cricket. A lot of people thought it went on way too long so we changed the rules to make it shorter and more colourful. Of course the purists weren’t pleased.

I grew up with that incredible 80s test team of Crowe and Hadlee, Edgar and Chatfield, watching enthralled as we took on the likes of the Aussies and the Windies with their great players of the era.

Of course it wasn’t just Test Matches, One Day Games, pajama cricket, had come along. But that was fine it still looked like cricket, a contest between bat and ball.

There always seemed to be a game on in the summer. Lance Cairns crashing the ball into the crowd, Hadlee dominating the Aussie batsmen, the sheer elegance of Martin Crowe as a batsman - it was beautiful to watch.

But now it’s all about money and that silly 20/20 slogathon where there’s no contest between bat and ball. Pitches designed so the batsmen can take the bowlers apart in every game like big Lance did that memorable time at the MCG.

I can still remember specific test matches from forty years ago, rear guard batting actions - Coney and Chatfield together, Hadlee searching for the elusive winning wicket in Australia. I’d struggle to recall any 20/20 game from the last year. I’m sure some people find it fun, but it’s not really cricket to me.

Still, we have at least done something, instead of just moaning.

We had a couple of really nice days of weather, some of us got a bit sunburnt, but mostly it’s pretty average. A lot of rain leading up to Christmas and now in Auckland mild overcast weather for days.

It’s hard to know how much to trust the memory but it really seemed as a kid that more often than not the weather over Christmas was glorious. Cloudless blue skies, sweltering heat, buzzing insects, summer smells, cricket obviously, and hot nights when you couldn’t get to sleep.

The last couple of nights I’ve almost put the heating on!

I’m getting a feeling of deja vu, I can’t remember if I’ve written about this before or just moaned about it a lot? The long and short of it is we all know the weather will be at it’s best, the water warmest, come the end of January and through February.

The French aren’t stupid, they practically close their country for the month of August - not late June/early July. But not us we have our annual holiday when the weather is unreliable and then when the weather’s great we send the kids back to the classrooms.

So we carry on moaning, although to be fair there are bigger issues.

Do you remember the big one, twelve years ago now? I remember my wife and daughter Emma staying up watching the updates, wondering if the world was about to go a bit pear shaped.

They say the radiation released at Fukushima was only 10 percent of the amount released at Chernobyl, but to be honest that’s not the most comforting of statistics.

And now here we are again. The following from the Japan Times:

Japan’s nuclear power plants along the Sea of Japan coast escaped serious damage in the New Year’s Day earthquake that struck the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture.

But the 7.6 magnitude quake, which triggered tsunami warnings from Hokkaido to Kyushu and led to evacuations in nine prefectures, could once again spark public concern about the safety of nuclear power in an earthquake-prone country at a time when Prime Minister Fumio Kishida plans to ramp up its usage as part of his "green transformation" policy…

While the nuclear power plants avoided damage, the New Year’s Day quake and tsunami warnings brought back memories of the devastating Great East Japan Earthquake and triple meltdowns at the Fukushima No. 1 power plant, and could revive doubts about the nuclear industry — especially at a time when the government has plans to use more reactors, many located on the Sea of Japan coast, that have been offline since the quake on March 11, 2011.

Surely there has to be a better place for the world to have nuclear reactors than on the pacific rim, an area prone to disasters? Or other alternatives for sustainable power generation?

A big job to change things no doubt, but it must be a better job that waiting for a really big one that drops it’s radioactive guts into the Pacific Ocean, and our food chain.

We all know the lifecycle of the ham. So delicious that first day, glazed and moist, practically juicy. Great thick slices off the bone with a decadent amount of fat.

In the following days, so nice and easy with salad and perhaps bread or some boiled spuds and sweetcorn. Then less inspiring meals later with it sliced into pasta dishes or omelettes as you grow reluctant to eat it without cooking it.

Then finally in desperation perhaps freezing pieces that you’ll end up throwing out a year or two later. The nervousness that perhaps we went one meal too far before calling time.

You might enjoy the twelve days of Christmas from Frank Macskasy, someone I’ve long admired.

The thing is, there must be a sensible time to stop eating the ham. Somewhere between it starting to smell a bit funny and changing colour. It’s not an open ended deal.

Who am I kidding we’re never going to change. It is an intrinsic part of the kiwi summer, the kids rolling their eyes at yet another creative use of leftovers. Just don’t serve it to them once it goes green - you need to cut those pieces off.

One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing.
Yes, you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky.
But 'til that morning, there's nothing can harm you.
Yes, with daddy and mammy standing by…

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