Sunshine State

It is a perfectly glorious, sunny, pre-summer day in North Queensland today.

The sun is shining, but the clouds in the sky are softening it a bit. The poinciana trees are flowering, along with those trees with the yellow flowers - the ones planted on every second street in the "middle aged" suburbs, but for which I never did find out what the name is...

They are, of course, introduced species, but they've always been the heralds of summer and, with it, Christmas.

Welcome to the Southern Hemisphere, where "it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" when the trees burst into a glorious array of colour.

Oh, and it's not just the trees, per se. We're edging close to the time of year when the lorikeets come to town to feast on the flowers, and everything sort of explodes with life. Screeching, squawking, getting-drunk-on-nectar-and-slamming into your windows life. The galahs are already back, and the cockatoos forgot to leave during winter, so we'll all be having a Psittaciformes-y old time before you know it.

It's hot, now, but not yet really-really-really hot. That usually kicks in the week before Christmas and gets worse throughout January.

Oh, but the fruit is starting to shift, and nectarines are turning up in the shops. Very soon we'll be seeing peaches, apricots and cherries at affordable prices. Of course, the true joy of a tropical summer comes from feasting on a handful of lychees on the back stairs or trying to eat a mango without wearing the juice.

It's a brilliant thing, a tropical summer. We're all sick of it by February, but in these early stages it's a source of strange magic.

Yessirree. It's a beautiful, warm, sunny Sunday, with lots of sunshine dappling through the trees. The trees I can see from the window. The window I can half see from where I'm sitting. At work.

There are some days when working on a Sunday sucks more than usual.