10 lies about Wellington's weather

1. There is dust everywhere, in everything. It blows in all the cracks until even inside all the surfaces have a fine layer. My house looks like a film set from a ghost town. My eyes are gritty, my nose is lined with dust and I can still feel it in my throat since I unwisely opened my mouth outside to call to a friend, just visible through the haze across the street.
   

2. The mounds of grey unmelted snow look like an elephants graveyard, slumped beasts who have lost their bulk and now the skin hangs in arcs from bone to bone. Snow looks so pristine when it arrives and becomes the trap for the all the city's filth.
   

3. The air is so dry my lips are chapped and my hands itch. I have to be carefully what I wear so as not to get too much static build up and the resulting shocks. But at least the plastic wrap really sticks!
   

4. The weather has been the same for weeks. You don't need a weather report here, just a calendar.
   

5. My eyes itch with smog. Even if you look straight up the sky is not clear blue, where it meets the hills it is brown. The sun sets spectacularly but never touches the horizon.
   

6. The path outside our house has become a crevasse through the snow that I have to clear every morning. The outside world seems like a myth from inside the quiet and warm womb of the drift which has consumed our house.
   

7. I'm used to the constant sweating, the prickle on my forehead, the slow trickle down my cleavage. But at night I toss and turn, no sheet - cooler but nothing between my sweaty limbs - or sheet - hotter but some relief from the hot, sticky feel of limb against limb.
   

8. It has been still for weeks, the flags hang lifeless on the poles, the smell of the city hangs around it like a blanket - car exhaust and cooking fat, seaweed and sewage.
   

9. It is tornado season, when the thunder clouds build, towering over the hills and the sky starts, almost imperceptibly at first, to turn that eerie green, I watch with dread and anticipation, trying to balance the urge to hide and the need to watch these most spectacular forces at work. The lighting forks down from the sky and each bolt is a curse.
   

10. I love the monsoon. The water comes to quench an unimaginable thirst, the anticipation of the arid land building month by month, week by week, day by day until - suddenly there is nothing dry, nothing wanting. Water is everywhere, an overabundance, a deluge, a flood. The streets are rivers and buildings are islands. The thick warm rain is so unlike any other time of year and yet so right.