Warning! A whinge on wind

Please be warned this is a rant. Miss Eagle is ranting about the weather - Melbourne weather. Now, for those outside Australia, you need to know that Melbourne is notorious for its weather. Four seasons in one day. Conversation about the weather - because there is so much of it to talk about.

But Monday has been a piercingly cold day and then came increasing wind. And it is the wind, dear Reader, that drives Miss Eagle to distraction, towards madness, into grumpiness and now a rant. It is not only the force of the wind, not only the penetration of the wind, it is the noise of the wind.

Miss Eagle has lived through a few tropical cyclones in her lifetime and that is the only time - other than with Melbourne wind - that she has heard such noise associated with wind. And at 6.10pm out went the lights at Upper Gully not to come on until 7pm. So candles were lit, the camping fluoro came out for the kitchen, and meal preparation went ahead because we have a gas stove. And still the wind came, the noise came.

And so to bed with a book - Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver - and the electric blanket: shut-eye to shut out the wind. Miss Eagle is now awake in the early hours of Tuesday morning. The wind is subsiding along with the noise and the rain commences. Perhaps if your correspondent cared or dared to look out into the blackness she would find that the full moon is nowhere to be seen, hidden by bank upon bank of cloud.

And it is not just the wind of winter, it is the gloom of winter. Midday yesterday Miss Eagle looked at the lemony sunlight sitting on Melbourne's mountains beyond the northern suburbs under thick layers of grey cloud. It occurred to her that this lemony sunlight was familiar - it was the sort of colour that precedes sunrise in northern Australia yet this was noonish!

When this goes on for days, Miss Eagle is overtaken by S.A.D. - seasonal affective disorder. Not enought sunlight - certainly nowhere near enough for a girl from the tropics. Now Miss Eagle is not suggesting she has the deep melancholia of Finland (for Finnish insights see Anni Heino's blog, Mayday) but it is the blahs - only more so. To counter this Miss Eagle lights up the lights. The office where she blogs is well lit but on the desk is a fluorescent lamp and there is also a very bright standard lamp. Overlit the room may be, but it is an attempt to alleviate the symptoms.

There is a beautiful winter: the clearness of the Whitsundays; the view from Townsville's Melton Hill on a crisp tropical winter's day with air so clear you can almost see the people walking on the jetty at Picnic Bay on Magnetic Island; the stillness of the waters off Port Douglas. Oh, my beloved Capricornia, why can't I be with you!