Baby it is Cold Outside

Bloody hell, it is cold outside. Brrr! Summer is over, winter is here, for sure, I can feel it up my back as my t-shirt comes untucked. I have the open fire stoked up with wood and it is burning beautifully. The flames are orange and red as they lick around the lumps of jarrah, as they slowly crumble into red coals and then black ash. Hot. Bright. Colourful. We are in our warm bubble, inflated around us against the cold. The bulldog rolls over and stretches so I can pat his tummy.

The wind blows. 

The night is dark.

Buddy hears a siren in the distance and leaps to his feet and runs to the back door wanting to go outside. It is his thing, he has a delight for sirens, he loves them. I push the door open and he steps over the threshold to bark in the back yard. I was encouraging him to bark, to show the bitch up the back that dogs are allowed to be dogs, but the truth is even if Buddy runs up the back yard excitedly he very rarely barks. The cold wind hits him and he hesitates and then changes his mind and returns in doors... if he had a tail, it would have been between his legs.

It's cold outside.

Scarves and mittens cold.

Icy cold. It cuts through me as I head up to the back of the back yard to collect some more pieces of wood. Brrr! The rats still scurry about in the under growth, the fading yellow leaves still fall from the golden elm. The drunken suburban tourists still hoot and holler in the distance, in our streets in away they would never accept in their own neighbourhood, hopefully just before they step drunkenly in front of speeding traffic, as retribution. Clunk. Thud. To be returned cold and stiff to outer suburban funeral homes where they belong.

You know the types, who live in the outer suburbs, who come to the inner suburbs to party and to yahoo and to scream and fall about drunk and make the kind of noise they would never accept in their own suburbs.

We need to send them back to the end of the train line in body bags.

That's what I say.

It's cold.

I am on day 3 of quitting smoking and it makes me mean.