Anyone who has lived there would know the sort of day Parade is talking about: when you can break out in a sweat just getting up from the lounge and when your shirt is soaked through by the time you walk from the front door to the mailbox.

Parade’s little slice of western Sydney back when he lived there was a suburb hard up against the foothills of the Blue Mountains, where you could get a frost in the winter and a 44 degree day in January (though spring and autumn were nice).

A summer’s day in that suburb would be as sticky as a post-it note and as suffocating as a plastic bag.

Parade slowly got used to the weather when he was living there, but he has since lost any of that acclimatisation – which was obvious when he travelled back to lend a bit of elbow grease in a house clean-up.

It didn’t help that the house had been closed up for some time and didn’t have any air-conditioning, of course. And early February was not the best time to be doing physical work in the middle of the day.

But the real reason Parade was red-faced and dripping within the first five minutes was simply that Bathurst summers have spoiled him.

It was a relief, to say the least, to drive back over the Blue Mountains that afternoon to a more forgiving February climate.

WHAT wasn’t pleasant on the way back was to see the amount of rubbish by the side of the Great Western Highway.

Parade doesn’t know whether it’s become worse recently or whether he hasn’t previously taken much notice, but he was flabbergasted by the sheer volume of litter on both sides of the road.

Watching kilometre after kilometre of this, Parade kept thinking the same thing: an enterprising person could pay off a Mosman house through the Return and Earn Scheme with all those bottles and cans.

You’d spend a fair bit of time collecting them all, though.