Last night I lay in my attic bed in the small hours listening to the rain relentlessly battering the roof. It was so heavy, & it went on & on & on; I knew it was going to be bad outside, & it was. Down in the valleys, the streets had become raging rivers, waist-deep, terrifying. Cars floated & washed away. People’s houses were sluiced through & hillsides fell down. One guy is missing. 77mm in one hour.

Climate change is moreness— whatever weather you have, you get more of it, metastasised. I was in the Auckland floods too: those rains & these rains were not normal rains, I’ve never seen or heard anything like them before. It’s just through a fluke of timing that I’m now up here on the hill instead of down there in my old house, right in the river’s path. I saw videos, my old street was a torrent. (I remember the fear I used to feel when it rained too heavily for too long, the home-made floodgate & sandbags we had standing ready beside the front gate.)

While I lay there in my bed last night, half-asleep & half-awake, listening to the violence of the rain just a few feet above me, I was thinking about the particular colour of floodwater. Tea with milk or coffee with milk; sometimes tannic, sometimes yellowish, but always turbid, thick with mud & other shit. A colour we didn’t used to know, but now we know. That colour— floodwater colour— is the 2020s in Aotearoa New Zealand. Hard to know what to say except fuck this climate-change-denying Government, & solidarity to all those not sleeping in their own beds tonight.