All butterflies will hunker down. Television news reporters will brave the waterfront for that embattled look. For today, as I write, it is windy.
Here in Canterbury it’s the hot dry nor’wester, that’s dumped its rain on Greymouth and the alps and is now rushing across the plains and sucking them dry.
Every so often I hear a nail graunch, a nail banged in some 60 years ago, now threatened with extraction. And if one goes, the pressure will grow on others, and more will yield and a sheet of iron will loosen and flap, and an extra blast will lift it clean away to cartwheel murderously down the street.
And then the wind will be inside the roof and what could it not do? Wind mocks our stuff.
Yet it is nothing, a process, the shift of air from high pressure to low, invisible, ephemeral, its existence noted only from its effects. But what effects.
To run with such a wind is to take huge ballooning strides, an Armstrong on the moon, defying gravity and eating up the land. To run against it is comic impotence, leaning into its unseen wall, arm and legs pumping to go nowhere, to stay where you are.
The fiercest wind I’ve known was the wind that blew the only night I ever spent in San Francisco. I was 25 years old and hitching down the West Coast of the States and when I crossed the Golden Gate the thing was rattling fit to break.
Down town among the skyscrapers a cloud of hats danced overhead, hats whisked away and held up high in some gale-created vortex.
On the sidewalk I took a notebook from my pocket but the wind was having none of it. It snatched the book and flung it smack against a wall some 30ft away.
I took the hint, withdrew into a bar and ordered beer. But round the building the wind still prowled like some rough beast, testing doors and windows, seeking weakness, roaring, and drinkers sat staring towards it in silence, gauging its mood and its force.
When a body came in off the street the wind would throw him through the doors and follow him in, making beermats fly, and a pair of barmen would have to lean against the heavy door to close it.
When I came to Lyttelton in 1988 my next door neighbour was a 90-year-old who’d been a seaman all his life.
He had started as a lad on the last of the sailing ships, going round the world like Drake or Cook or Tasman, hoisting canvas to catch the wind and fly. There was nothing he couldn’t do with rope.
But you should have seen his hands — the ropes, the windlasses, the fights.
In the old days the winds were shown on charts as fat-faced cherubs. "Blow winds and crack thy cheeks," screamed King Lear in the midst of the maddening gale.
I get up from my desk and go outside, and the wind tries to wrench the door from my hand.
Since I last went out it has filled the garage with wistaria petals, like mauve confetti. It’s overturned the wheelbarrow. It’s loosened a stack of firewood.
It has had a go at everything, shifting what it can shift, wanton in its ways. High in the sky it is flinging a gull about like a scrap of paper.
For all their mastery of the air most gulls today are land-bound, standing it out, facing into it.
The thin branches of the wattle are streaming to lee, the fat trunk swaying perceptibly, and you can sense the roots clenching their grip on the rock beneath the topsoil, like claws on a crag.
Overnight the wind will wither and die, and tomorrow it will be only its legacy, the headlines, the power cuts, the trees downed, the plane schedules disrupted. It won’t be there; it won’t be anywhere. But it is now, right now.
It’s windy.
• Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton writer.
