My hometown of Armidale has just been ravaged by a mega-hailstorm (news story here), with tennis ball sized hailstones wreaking havoc and piling up to 1/2 a metre in places. A state of emergency has been declared. We had a very similiar storm about 9 years ago now, which caused considerable damage. In fact, some of the trees in our garden still bear scars from that storm. I’m heading down there tomorrow morning for the Christmas break. Hopefully this storm wasn’t as bad as the last one. The upshot is that, unless it’s all molten away by then, we might actually have a white Christmas in Armidale. Speaking of white Christmases, quite a few years ago Armidale actually had a genuine white Christmas, in the true sense – with snow that is. That’s right, smack bang in the middle of summer we had a white Christmas in Australia. What’s going down with the weather (the first person to write ‘global warming, yadda yadda’ gets a smack in the head).


Photo from the SMH