Parade was up at the uni on Friday morning and can report that, between the temperature, the occasional spit of rain and the grey skies, the descriptions “arctic” and “bloody cold” kept springing to mind.

(It was an official eight degrees in Bathurst at that time, according to Parade’s favoured weather website, but Parade reckons it was at least four or five degrees less than that if you were out in the open up at the campus.)

You can’t do anything about the weather, but Parade had to feel a bit sorry for those who had organised the prospective students’ day, who must have spent most of their time explaining to visitors that, no, Bathurst does not always feel like the inside of a bottle shop’s coolroom.

And here’s something else to think about: Parade had read earlier in the week that some of the registrations for Friday’s event had come from high school students in Moruya, Gunnedah and Hay.

What does a resident of the Hay Plains – that baking, flat country in central NSW where it can get up to 45 degrees in summer – think when they get out of the car and get a full face of a fearsome Bathurst winter’s day?

Parade can only imagine, but it can’t be good.

AS Javier Bardem’s menacing, memorable villain says in the unsettling Oscar-winner No Country For Old Men, sometimes you have to make a call.

For the sports fans of Bathurst, that call might be harder than usual on Saturday night.

Consider the following: during the one evening, at the same time, local sports fanatics will be forced to choose between the second Australia-Ireland rugby union Test, the second cricket one-dayer between Australia and England and Australia’s opening game (against France) in the soccer World Cup.

And that’s not including the NRL and AFL games that will be played at the same time as part of the regular rounds of those respective competitions.

Good luck, sports nuts. You’re going to need it.