Overbridge sunrise

The forecast for the day was for long periods of fine weather with evening high cloud, light northeasterlies, and a high of a delicious 20 degrees.

Now 20 degrees — for Dunedin at any time of year — is practically tropical, but in May is simply unheard of. The city’s infrastructure simply isn’t built to handle such extreme weather. When you take into consideration that this was the third day of the current run of fine weather, Dunedin was approaching, it must be said — a heatwave. 

In fact, we were teetering on the brink of what I like to call the John Caswell Heatwave Threshold —  an entirely unscientific, arbitrary benchmark that is based on nothing but my own personal feelings about the weather! To be clear, my own personal threshold for heatwave in Dunedin is as follows: any spell of weather that is better than the previous summer. So, while my system might not be as reliable as the official one, it’s my rule, so I get to make-up the parameters.

Now, the previous summer, and I will be quite frank here, was simply awful. It was a masterclass in disappointment. Throughout most of December, January, and into February, there hadn’t been more than three days in a row where the weather was fine, warm, and pleasant. What you might traditionally associate with summer. Most of the time, there had been low cloud, wind and long periods of rain hanging around the city like it had nowhere better to be.

Yet, here I was, on a warm Dunedin morning in May, watching the sun appear over the peninsula, with another long, fine day in prospect, wondering if we’d need to declare a state of emergency if the mercury hit 21 degrees. The only question was, what was I going to do with it? A completely rhetorical question I can assure you.