The cold hard truth is air conditioners have gone too far | Peter Goers

Once upon a time you could solve this problem with a handkerchief or a light breeze. Now we’re too cold and coddled, writes Peter Goers.

One of the cold, hard facts about public airconditioning is that it’s just too bloody cold.

Cinemas have been too cold for years and now live theatres are freezing us out.

I had to watch one Fringe show with my jacket over my head because it was arctic in the theatre. Unknowingly, I was sitting under a vent and now I’m really venting.

The management has corrected this but, golly, it was (expletive deleted) cold.

This also happened at another Fringe venue and then the entire Festival Theatre audience froze on the opening night of Sister Act. We felt we were watching Frozen and most of us wished we were.

On all these occasions the weather outside was cool.

Why can’t aircon be adjusted accordingly? Why can’t it be mild? Why are we made to feel we are watching a show in a fridge? This is what a thermostat is for. Use it!

We are over-airconditioned as a society and we’re getting very soft.

Don’t complain. It’s hotter in Perth. Picture: iStock

We’ve only had two brief heatwaves this summer but aircon remains freezing when we’re not sweltering anymore.

We used to be cooled by “gettin’ a sea breeze off the gutter” to quote the best and most immortal line from the greatest Australian play, Summer Of The Seventeenth Doll.

Now we are hermetically sealed in glass houses and public buildings and can no longer open a window to get a welcome sea or gully breeze through the fly wire. Our lives are in a permanent cool change.

Not every woman is menopausal and there’s a lot to be said for a hand fan. I once thought I had andropause (male menopause) and I felt a bit queer for 10 minutes, had a bit of a cough, and it passed.

Once upon a time if you were hot you tied a wet hanky on your head or draped a wet flannel around your neck, kiddies gambolled under sprinklers and slept out on the front lawn.

Then we got spoiled and had a clunky airconditioner in a window but they always seemed to be in the wrong room – cooling the good room which you never really used and you hoped, in vain, that the “coolth” would waft into other rooms.

Against their protestations, my father bought my aged grandparents a window airconditioner and it’d be 45 degrees and they’d sit there looking at it without turning it on.

“Oh, don’t worry about us”, they’d say, “it’s hotter in Perth”.

Then came evaporative, ducted and split system aircons. In 1999, 35 per cent of Australian homes had aircon and by 2010 it was 70 per cent. Now it must be 90 per cent.

The greenhouse gas emissions, to say nothing of the electricity bills, are appalling. We are killing the planet just to be cool, which is not cool.

Mercifully, the aircon in my Glenelg apartment does not work and I have no intention of fixing it.

I use a heated rug in the winter and, here’s a novel idea, open a window in the summer. Yes, summer can be hot, but how sweat it is.

The world-renowned and nationally beloved Adelaide Oval in all its redeveloped glory. Picture: Ben Clark

Opposing everything is the Adelaide condition. Naysayers are always an empty vessel making the most noise.

The tram extension from Victoria Square to Hindmarsh, the footbridge to Adelaide Oval, the redevelopment of the quaint Adelaide Oval to a grand football stadium, and the new RAH – all this infrastructure was vociferously opposed yet, once built, became hugely popular.

The spoilsports never admit they were wrong and just look for something else to oppose. Thus, the proposed tram extension to North Adelaide will be opposed by the usual suspects but we’ll eventually get it and it will be very useful and popular.

Why did we rid Adelaide of nearly 20 tramlines in 1958? Melbourne kept its vast network of tramlines and they serve that strange city very well.

We need more public transport.

Anyone who opposes that needs to build a bridge and get over it and, speaking of bridges, we need a better bridge over the Torrens on King William Rd otherwise we’ll have no tram. At the moment it’s not a bridge over troubled water but a troubled bridge over water.

HOT

Maitland Bakery

Beetaloo Valley in the southern Flinders Ranges

The new arts plan is probably better than no arts plan

Rhonda Burchmore – not only a star but a great trouper

NOT

The lack of funding for Tarrakarri Aboriginal Arts Centre. We’d get it for what we pay the AFL for three Gather Rounds.

Are you sick of the federal election already?

Originally published as The cold hard truth is air conditioners have gone too far | Peter Goers