The long and windy groan
April 26th 2009 07:55
A deed of epic endurance and heroism has been done here this day. Despite overwhelming difficulties, I can place a tick in today's box on my exercise schedule. Or at least, I will once I get the frostbite treated and regain use of my right hand.
This is about extreme weather conditions. Himalayan climbers would not venture out in this. The weather in Melbourne is so bad right now that it would panic some of the hardier kinds of igloo.
It wasn't so bad shortly after dawn, when my wife left on a trip to Toronto. "Whatever happens here, I expect it will be colder in Canada," she said. Bah!
By midday, a mini Ice Age had settled over my suburb, and if I had known the hardship I would have to endure on my 80-minute walk and run along the Maribyrnong River pathways, I would never have opened the front door, let alone broken down the wall of packed snow which had formed there.
They might have tools for dealing with this kind of thing in Canada — snow dynamite or a lance-shaped bulldozer perhaps — but I had to beat my way out into the howling gale using only my bare hands and strength of will.
The wind! Tall trees bent before it. America's Cup sailors fled in terror. As I lent forward at an angle calculated to prevent me being thrown on my back, my nose touched the ground.
Why even go out in such conditions, I hear you ask.
Well, it's all my wife's fault really that, while she sat comfortably in a warm cocoon at 30,000 feet, I should be out in conditions which would have shocked Shackleton.
She pleads with me to exercise regularly, you see. She uses subtly irresistible arguments about health and life quality and her keen desire to grow old together. It's the last one that gets me out the door on days like today.
The good thing is that, being on a plane to Canada as she is, my wife won't know, when she reads this, if I have slightly exaggerated the conditions. I haven't, of course. Well, maybe a teensy bit.
image: gerwc.com
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