½ñÈÕ³Ô¹Ï

Enough. For God’s sake — enough already, honey. I know you said you’d pop in for a quick stopover, but surely there are limits. Look at the mess.

Don’t you get it? Sometimes enough is just enough. One of them is now.

I mean, darling Nina, you arrived three weeks ago, just put up your feet and decided Ol’ Sydney town was a nice place for a few extra days in your extended vacation. You began quietly enough, just slipped in after spring had become summer, the chills of winter slipping into oblivion.

We must have been a good month with the days that force boys to dress down, shirts off and bodies glaring white. Heaven help us, the first beach tomatoes were seen, sorry and sore from the glaring sun on translucent, pasty skin.

Now our sports fields lie sodden, unusable. The dragonboats could easily be in Centennial Park, not Blackwattle Bay, the rowers could get dropped off at their Glebe doorsteps with an additional stroke of the paddle. Thanks, gorgeous La Nina, for stopping by and drowning our city.

The golden lifesavers of North Bondi have had to ply their wares in their clubhouse, as it is really not cool to be seen with an umbrella and speedos. White bodies blend into the backdrop of rainclouds — hardly a photographer’s paradise.

Our sailors are bailing, literally, just to stay afloat, while our soccer stars get ready to picnic at the beach where the sand at least drains the water away overnight.

Lovely Nina, is it really too much to ask that you take a short trip? I hear there are islands just north of New Zealand that require rain, although the streets and stormwater drains around me suggest you’ve weed yourself dry. But no! Even as I speak you crank up the wind and open wide the bra and let loose once more.

Let’s look at the pros and cons, sweetie. The gardens surrounding Botany Bay are so well watered it appears the tropics have come to settle in. Wonderful start to a hot, dry summer — if you piss off and let El Nino take up residence, that is.

Traffic is a mess. Trains smell like a two-year-old running shoe that has just done a Frontrunners fun run. Anyone would think Mary Poppins has bred and multiplied over the past weeks to fill our streets, not just our stages.

We know the roof leaks. Thanks for that, Nina. Right before the silly season, where a strapping roofer to fix the blessed thing is nowhere to be found, and when found is hungover from the 19th of his 47 end-of-year ‘must attend’ tradies’ functions.

The hardware shop is out of silicon, a drag queen’s worst nightmare. The trees think it’s spring and shoot off another bunch of buds. Great.

So now I get wet watching TV, kept awake by your incessant crashing and rumbling all night, become irritable on the way to work in a stinking bus (or should I drive for a dry change like the 4.98 million other Sydneysiders this morning?), have my exercise patterns shot to pieces as one really can’t ride in the rain in Sydney, and am driven insane by the furkids who are over being drenched then coiffed and blow-waved after walkies.

Thanks Nina, it has been a pleasure. Now piss off so we can get out to play in the sun: www.teamsydney.org.au

By WALLY SALINGER