Editorial: Be warned, Palmy, your time is nigh

I departed a balmy Palmerston North only to drive (two hours later) into cold Hawke's Bay rain.

An unlikely scenario, I know.

Yet such was the experience last Sunday as I left holiday mode in Palmy to return home for work.

Manawatu's full of interesting sights. Not least of which is the intriguing spectre of mall-going couples in matching motorsport tracksuits.

But that's not the oddity that lingered. Instead, it was the irrefutable impression that this is an intensely active province. At least compared with ours.

Cyclists are everywhere. Runners are everywhere. Walkers are everywhere. Cars fly past with kayaks atop.

Tennis balls bounce onto the road from courts in full swing. And let's not forget this was Boxing Day and the days immediately after - when most of us were digesting our bodyweight in turkey and trifle.

Back in the Bay our streets were sans exercisers. For whatever reason we seem to have adopted a sedentary stance, or seat. Compared with the migratory and dynamic species of Palmerston North, we're akin to barnacles.

So why are we so bed-bound, couch-bound, moribund?

I thought back to a theory Napier's Douglas Lloyd Jenkins raised a few years back, when he ventured it's possible warm climates precluded productivity and stunted industry.

He was speaking in a creative sense of course, and named a few examples of where colder cities seemed to elicit the best ideas.

I guess the creatively cold hubs of Wellington and Dunedin spring to mind.

So are the province's harmful UV rays more harmful than we think? Is the sun a sedative?

Seems plausible. The exquisitely gifted painter Rita Angus was born here in Hastings - yet she didn't paint in the province. She excelled elsewhere.

Yet to confuse things, enter the almost equally celebrated Allen Maddox. The celebrated abstract expressionist was born in the frigid environs of Liverpool, before immigrating to the Bay and painting his way to a sublime reputation from his sunny Burlington Road studio on Napier Hill.

The heartening thing is if global warming predictions prove correct, Palmerston North residents will grow fat like us, while here in the Bay we'll simply spend more time in the hammock.