IF YOU'RE GOING TO BUILD AN ARK INSURE THE BLOODY THING

Bring me a truckload of timber, a pallet of nails, a bucket of bee’s wax and call me an ark builder; the weather this summer has gone madder than a pre-Darwinian animal collector preparing for a tsunami in a desert.

Take for instance the part of the world where I grew up. It’s a little place called Cootamundra in Australia. Now interestingly, in the indigenous language of the region, ‘Cootamundra’ means something like ‘swamp turtle’. But all I ever recall growing up there was the endless droughts and subsequent bushfires. I mean, it would get so dry during the depth of summer there that even the dust would lose the dirt off its’ back on a windy day. And local cattle would be grateful to be able to chew dry old chunks of clay from the bottom of their watering hole while sheep would gouge each other’s eyes out to be first in line to have their woolly coats shorn by some overweight, singlet wearing clipper-maniac oozing perspiration in the fragrance of Jack Daniels.

But this week Cootamundra has been truly drenched – and I’m not talking about a Broad Spectrum oral antiparasitic drenching either – I’m talking about rain at a velocity and volume that would give Poseidon a titanic anxiety disorder for his troubles. It has bucketed down; and not the metaphorical ‘cats and dogs’ either; it’s poured down like hippos and walruses – and I’m thinking that right now, ‘maybe swamp turtles could live there’.

And here in New Zealand we’ve just been hit by a ‘weather bomb’. Now what’s that all about? Did some cell of fundamentalist Meteorologists decide to conduct a mass suicide forecast attack on us all – drawing isobars and troughs over selected maps without any regard for the human cost of their actions? For crying out loud, I had to cancel a plane trip because of their Mecca-maniacal meanderings.

But in all seriousness, some parts of New Zealand were hit by winds of over 150 kilometres per hour during the weekend. 150 kilometres an hour? Like, that’d rip your underwear after a plate of onions. And it tore roofs from houses, trees from the ground, and knocked out the local electricity supply (I guess Dorothy and Toto aren’t in Kansas anymore). And people have been left homeless and some don’t even have a place to charge their Ipod – how cruel is that?

But the whole world is getting like this. And I don’t know if it’s global warming or greenhouse gases or melting ice-caps or what – but we’re seeing heavier snow falls, torrential rain, cyclones, hurricanes and all manner of weather events across the globe. And they’re destroying townships and ripping communities apart. For example, where I live in New Zealand we haven’t had enough sun this summer to tan a possum-skin glove - and people here are just hopping mad about it.

And some people have a right to be hopping mad about it all. For instance, in the part of the country where I live the so-called ‘weather bomb’ hit a small community taking roofs off about 50 houses. Now that’s a terrible thing in itself, but the thing that truly turns my tornado is the number of those households that had no God-damned insurance!!! Like, their sitting there now screaming hardship and uncertainty and demanding to know who’s going to ride in and save their bacon when, in fact, they chose to take no responsibility whatsoever for themselves or their families in the first place.

“But we can’t afford insurance,” they tell you.

Well I say; “who can???”

Like, no-one pays insurance because they want to – they do it because they feel that they have to. That’s the responsible thing to do for you and your family. I mean, I could go to Disneyland twice a year for the amount of insurances I pay to protect my family (okay, Disneyland might not be a good example because nobody goes there anymore – but you get my point). When you live in a place that's prone to major weather events and you want to build an Ark, insure the bloody thing you stupid twat!!!

That’s what I think… and usually I’m right.