COMMENT:
When I was about 8, which was about 2005, I got into a fair whack of trouble at school for the first of only two ever times. My bowl cut and I had inadvertently stumbled upon the very first thing we were ever willing to take a strong stand for - the masses - with valiant disregard for the consequences. The details are now naturally a little blurry in my mind, and I intend to use that to my full advantage in retelling this story.
The story begins in the oppressive, dry summer heat of Christchurch, where temperatures reach such sweltering extremes as the mid-twenties. Sounds of cicadas fill the air. A warm norwest breeze rolls low across the parched school fields. The setting is a century old two-storey wooden school building, a traditionalist box full of formality and correct grammar, Sirs and Ma'ams, blazers and caps. There's me, sitting at my desk, in a classroom full of other little children who are also about to melt.
You see, we are talking about a time so long ago that heat pumps weren't in schools (if they even existed, I certainly hadn't heard of them), so there was no ability to harness the environment around us and usher it back into a more liveable climate. Perhaps we are even talking a time so long ago that there was no interest in the comfort of children. That being said, provisions were made for frosty winter mornings, where the school boiler would be fired up to heat the classrooms to the same uncomfortable level of warmth we endured in summer.
But in summer, we were stumped for ideas. Presumably the North Island has some kind of arrangement for summer warmth as we have for winter chill, but the best we could manage in summer was a suggestion to open the windows, which was about as effective for cooling the upper-storey classrooms as a suggestion to close the windows in winter would have been effective for heating them.