cold comfort

I'm thinking of changing. I've decided this shirt doesn't go with these pants. No, I'm thinking of changing my attitude to something. See, I grew up being driven around by mum & dad in a couple of very old holden station wagons. Air conditioning in an HQ wagon wasn't something you saw a lot of in the early 80s and so the best way we found to get cool was to open the window. On those hot summer NW Victorian days, it would still be 35° when you got home from school, so off we'd go to the pool at the golf club (free for members and their families' use, so dad joined more for the big wet hole than the 18 small ones) to cool off. Quite often we'd have the run of the pool as it was quite an undertaking to haul the whole family down to what was then the far side of town on a school day just to get wet. A lot of other kids were probably sweating it out in front of the TV watching Wombat or running under the sprinkler to cool off while we were doing bombs in the deep end and asking mum for 20 cents so we could get a packet of chicken Twisties from that new machine in the pool bar when you put the money in, keyed in C5 and the Twisties would work their way out of the wire spiral and fall to the bottom. So we'd swim, run off steam, cool down, feel much better ... then get back into the Holden Sauna and go home almost as hot as when we left. Man, those were the days. Though let's not get too sentimental about it, they were the days of being really stinking hot and all sleeping in the lounge or the hall under the vent of the evaporative air conditioner. These days you can't turn around without having a refrigerated air conditioner blowing unnaturally cool air in your face. They're in just about every shop, in cars, in workplaces. Sometimes they dry out the air too much and I get blood noses (I remember my first full week of work at the ABC; we were in the middle of a heat wave and on the second day, the dry air gave me the mother of all nosebleeds that took me out for a good hour and a half. The team must have thought I was such a bludging fuck. Still, I thought they were smug baby booomer arrogant fucks so we never really got that mutual admiration society off the ground). Anyway, I still prefer the evaporative air-con in a way. And when I'm in a car alone I just wind down all the windows and let the air swirl around me (while C prefers to run the air-con, even when it's a mild day outside and even though it smells like toxic chemicals for the first five minutes; all that wind makes her hair unruly). On days like today though, when the forecast top is 40°C and you have to walk from Vic Sq to North Tce and it's probably nearly 30° in the city at 8.45am, shit it's nice to walk into an air-conditioned building. Yes, I'm learning to love the temperature-controlled climate afforded by an industrial air conditioner. Needless to say, I shan't be leaving the office today unless someone starts a fucking fire (and even then, only after running around under the sprinklers for a while).