Summer busted out on the mid-east coast of Australia today. It's suddenly hot and wonderful and feels like a big lid has been taken off the sky. I drove to uni with my car in convertible mode (= all four windows down, you should try it) and my right elbow getting sunburnt and the White Stripes cranked up, and it felt like every good summer holiday memory was in the air at the same time. When I got to my tutorial we all decided it was too nice a day to sit in a stuffy classroom so we went down to the pub and discussed Dostoevsky out on the balcony. I left my shoes under my office desk all day. In the evening when I got home my bees were plastered over the front of the hive, madly fanning their wings to circulate the air through the hot box. It's hard to believe that a few days ago the air was still cold enough to prick bare skin into little lumps.

In a month and half Marty will be padding barefoot around Glebe and hanging out at Bondi Beach and eating the strawberries in his vege garden and so on. I will be in a thick thermal suit listening to the wind and re-tying riometer cables in a vast dead white expanse.

Eighteen months ago, when I returned from Iceland, I wrote this about my first impressions of the Australian summer:

The land, seen through my defamiliarised eyes, looks brown and scrubby and scrappy - you can see how the settlers can have hated it. The beaches are nice though. The air is so full of light! - like there's actually a concentration of sunlight solid in the sky, not just traveling through invisible until it hits an object. It's nice wearing shorts.

I remember the landscape seeming gaudy and overbearing, as if Australia had been designed by an obnoxious 80s interior decorator with a zeal for garish primary colours. The sky was too blue and the trees were too green, and there was no subtlety as there had been in Iceland where the ice was a delicate kaleidoscope of scattered blue light and pink glow. Now I think the Australian summer seems like the best thing ever. Antarctica could change my mind.