All rained out: will Joburg summer ever arrive?!

I used to be in a relationship where talking about the weather was expressly forbidden.  

The rationale was basically that if you were talking about the weather, it meant you didn’t have anything actually interesting to say. If you ever felt the urge to say something about it being unexpectedly muggy for this time of year, it was in fact preferable to stop oneself immediately  – to rather say nothing until a piercing observation about the debt crisis or the inexplicable popularity of Burrata (it’s literally tasteless, vaguely jellied milk. For the love of God can we please move on) had arrived in your brain.  

I absolutely internalized this rule. Quickly becoming that insufferable person who internally rolled their eyes at anyone offering harmless comments about it being chilly, or windy or was there a storm coming. Didn’t they know about the debt crisis!? Didn’t they know that Burrata was stupid? I always felt so superior in my studied avoidance of what felt like the conversational equivalent of a lazy stand-up’s 5-minute bit about airline food.    

Well, for the last month and a half in Johannesburg, it’s been impossible to avoid getting involved in a weather conversation. And the reason for this is that the weather has been, frankly, a shit show. After spring came in sharp and hot, like drunk aunt Verity fresh from a tropical holiday where she spent a month shacked up with a 23 year-old guy called Pedro, summer has sullenly refused to arrive. In its place it sent an unceasing, freakish carousel of gloom, drizzle, apocalypse and temperatures that at one point dropped down to the low teens and literally made me haul out the winter coat I’d stuffed, ahem, I mean neatly folded, into a very difficult-to-get-to box.  

Hold the Chenin Blanc  

Tik-tokkers are making memes about Joburg weather. Outdoor restaurants have kept blankets on the back of chairs and rekindled their winter fires, and I can’t imagine how many watermelons have gone unsold, left to stare out at the mizzle as shoppers bypass them for hot chocolate and things that have melted cheese in them. I have been forced to keep drinking red wine – the holiday Chenins stubbornly still stuffed in the crisping drawer of my fridge instead of something healthy, like an heirloom tomato or micro-herbs.  

The bottom line is that we’re having an experience that every sun-reddened Brit understands in the very roots of their DNA, but South Africans, and particularly Joburgers, are probably a little less familiar with: ‘a bad summer’. And even me, with my learned distaste for weather-talk, has found it impossible to ignore. 

For a country that lives a big chunk of its life outdoors, grumping about the weather has become less artless smalltalk, and more a way of ‘checking in’, of clocking strangers in the eye and just reassuring oneself and each other that “it’s not just me, right?” That this is all just feeling a little off. For weeks we’ve had everything packed and ready to rumble for a season that’s stubbornly refused to arrive, a torrid two month holding pattern of Summerus Interruptus where we’re doing our best to reassure ourselves that this isn’t how it’s meant to feel.   

Raining on my parade  

And in this I’ve come to realise that talking about the weather isn’t actually talking about the weather – it’s talking about all that it touches, which is everything. You try get a Capetonian to shut up about the last two winters. Or the January wind. Just try get a Durbanite to skirt around the warm dog’s-tongue blanket of wetness that they call ‘the air’ and see how far you get. Talking about the weather isn’t a failure of imagination or a conversational white flag, it’s how we take our own temperature, and weeks of grey, soaked Joburg afternoons have done something I thought would never happen to me. It has made me care less about having an opinion on whether or not one’s Spotify Wrapped actually means anything, and more about whether the sun might show up tomorrow. 

Weather-talk, it turns out, isn’t about clouds. It’s about the disruption of expectations and how much, for us, our December plans and general holiday mood are hugely influenced by something we have absolutely no control over. 

The day I was writing this it blossomed into a glorious sunny afternoon, blue skies, postcard puffy clouds, and I briefly panicked that I’d missed my window. That I’d written an entire hacky column about bad weather just as everything was snapping back into place. 

I made plans. Tennis. A braai. The optimism was immediate and… it turns out, irresponsible. The next morning the clouds were back and rain was sheeting down like the city had never made any promises at all. The carousel had just done another turn. 

And here I am. Talking about it. Because the weather is what it is, and this summer, it sucks. 

_{Top image: Rawpixel/Currency collage.}

Read more of Jono Hall’s writing here.