IT happens every year, but Parade could still almost hear an audible sigh on Tuesday when the weather got cold again.
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Parade thinks it should be reasonable to assume that, once the winter months have been safely negotiated and the first month-and-a-bit of spring is out of the way, jumpers can be put away and the extra blanket for the bed can go in the cupboard.
Not in Bathurst, however.
On Sunday, Parade was pulling weeds in the backyard in a pair of shorts and a shirt. On Tuesday morning, Parade was pulling the zipper to the top of his jumper and wrapping his hands around a cup of tea.
It may happen every year, but it does not make it any less disappointing.
Give the bored a sporting chance
THERE ought to be a word for the strange period of limbo between the end of the winter codes and the start of the Test cricket season.
Parade – who is not a soccer fan – is acutely feeling the absence of a sport to follow.
Parade knows you should not wish your life away, but found himself looking up the Test cricket series schedule the other day and calculating how long it was until the first match against South Africa.
This is how desperate Parade was on Sunday night: he found a domestic one-day game on one of the channels up the other end of the television and watched that for a bit while doing the ironing.
Parade had no context for the match – where the sides were placed on the ladder, who was in good form, who was new in the sides and who was not – but watched with interest anyway.
Doing sums on wild weather
HERE’S a question for those who haven’t ventured any further north in Australia than Tweed Heads: in an average season, how many cyclones form in the Australian region between November and April?
The answer, as Parade read this week, is 11 cyclones.
And of those 11, an average of four will make landfall.
It can be easy to forget for those who live on or near the lush east coast, but Australia is a tough, dangerous place: from bushfires to floods to cyclones to funnel-webs.