The Irish immigrant makes two grim discoveries on their first winter in Australia – first, Australia actually has a winter and, second, Australians apparently decline to insulate homes.
They may have some sort of moral objection to ensuring that it is warmer inside the house than outside it. Or perhaps they’re a people of such hardy, summery constitution overall that they simply forgot to insulate their dwellings. I’m unsure of the lore which constitutes the basis of this national “colder in than out” rule. I just know that Australians have come to accept it while the rest of us have not. They don’t complain.
Or if they do, I can’t hear them over the sound of all the non-Australians wondering aloud how it could be four degrees outside, and also in the kitchen.
This week alone, I have witnessed people from the Netherlands, Canada (yeah – the snowy one), China and the UK all complaining about being murderously cold inside their house or apartment. “I go to the gym just so I can feel my own feet,” the Canadian said.
RM Block
“In Canada we expect it. Things are built with an understanding of the climate. But here, it’s another kind of cold,” they said, their eyes affecting a sort of odd, glazed look, as though they had left warm feet behind in Canada.
I nodded sympathetically.
Incidentally, it is winter here in Canberra now, where temperatures hit below minus seven one night this week and where I am wearing thermal long johns to bed like an old man in a Western. Just as people at home emerge from, or are still stuck in, the heatwave you’ve all been complaining about. Naturally, having enjoyed an Australian summer already this year, it would be a very bad look for me to express jealousy of the fact that Limerick “got a nice run of sunny days, in fairness”.
And yet, here I am, sitting in an Australian apartment with my coat on, jealous of my niece and nephew (ages five and three) enjoying a whippy ice cream this month in the Mediterranean luxury of their Limerick back garden paddling pool. It’s shaped like a turtle.
I’m not proud of it – the jealousy, not the paddling pool.
Based on reports from friends and family at home, I understand that Ireland has been managing the kind of heat my mother used to describe as “oppressive” while puffing her cheeks out like a woman overburdened with it all. It’s a word generally reserved for dystopian political regimes and the experience of just having somehow zipped yourself dangerously into a pair of jeans three sizes too small.
All the messages from home these last weeks suggest a country in extremis. “I’ve gone to the seaside to wait it out,” my friend’s voice note said, in a tone that evoked someone faking their own death to evade arrest. “The Londis has run out of Soleros,” came another message, like someone reporting from the frontlines of a devastating natural disaster.
Everyone who has been in touch from home appears to have been felled by the kind of hot weather which during my childhood would have necessitated a dinner of cold ham, iceberg lettuce, half a boiled egg and a large, wet slice of posthumous tomato. A slice of Irish tomato of the 1990s, which slithers over the tongue and down the throat like a bad oyster. This kind of dinner is a beautiful (if gastronomically repulsive) tradition in our culture – one which has thankfully been obliterated now that we can order our dinner via apps when we’re too tired or hot to cook.
All cultures have their version. It’s the sort of dinner the British call “picky bits”, except they get their picky bits at Marks and Spencer, and it’s a dinner of olives and Manchego wrapped in prosciutto and artichoke hearts. Nobody has boiled an egg inside a nuclear reactor, such that throwing it at a person could knock them unconscious, and you eat this dinner on a picnic blanket on Hampstead Heath or off the Elgin Marbles instead of your mother’s kitchen table as she says: “Nobody could be cooking in this weather, you’d get Jaysus heat stroke.”
As you can likely tell, Canberra’s winter can make a person wax sentimental for an Irish summer. I find myself yearning for a time when “June” or “July” meant hot weather and weird, deconstructed, low-effort dinners containing not one shred of dietary fibre. For a time when I could feel my feet. This is particularly ironic, since attending a convent school in Limerick meant having chilblained feet and hands with blue fingernails for 12 consecutive years. Had they looked nice, the radiators would largely have been decorative.
I’ve been told by some readers of this column that I’m too negative about Ireland and too positive about Australia. Others, naturally, have accused me of directly the opposite, so I suppose I’ll have to put the whole thing down to journalistic balance and await my Pulitzer any day now. But I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I don’t hear the feedback. That I don’t listen.
So for those who say I’m down on my deeply beloved home country, which I complain about and write love letters to in equal measure, like every Irish expat writer, I wanted to share this potentially libellous message about Australian buildings (many of which we probably built, to be fair, so it might be our own fault). They are constructed neither for summer nor winter, but rather to maximise a sort of homesteading spirit of personal toughness in the face of a vast, capricious and indomitable natural landscape.
That’s very poetic, but it feels a smidge less so when you’re wearing your scarf and gloves while trying to butter toast. The Australians get a lot of things right – coffee; side servings of chips that are somehow one kilo of chips; the cost of electricity.
But!
If you want your living room to feel warmer than the street it overlooks in winter, I’m afraid you’ll have to move to Limerick.
Or one of the warmer parts of Australia.
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