It's January, but, this week notwithstanding, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was November, or April, even. It's not the La Nina summer we were promised, but one with two faces.
Extreme weather events are just one example of the near-constant uncertainties of the year ahead. So too are fluctuating COVID numbers, plummeting house prices, cost-of-living blowouts and the ongoing war in Ukraine - all the headline topics that have been with us for months now.
No wonder some of us are turning to astrology, and other forms of futurology, and the predictions of a medieval French astrologer and physician are, once more, top of the pops when it comes to reliable soothsayers.
Nostradamus, it seems, predicted Queen Elizabeth's (entirely predictable) death right down to the year and her age. He also apparently predicted the Great Fire of London, the French Revolution, the shooting of John F. Kennedy, the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II and the September 11 attacks.
This was back in the mid-1500s when he was reportedly high on nutmeg, but still. It's not surprising that a 2006 volume of interpretations of his predictions, Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies for the Future, by Mario Reading, recently shot to the English bestseller lists.
Not surprising, but, for historian Darius von Guttner, it's an enduring source of fascination. Why do we reach for the stars? Why is it important to us modern-day humans that someone, somewhere, once predicted something that went on to happen?
"What Nostradamus, in fact, is doing in the 16th century, is just providing this kind of a guide for the future - he's responding to this very innate human need to know," von Guttner says.
"And why do we reach for the stars? For the same reasons - we want to know, we're curious, we want to expand the boundaries of our knowledge."
Currently dean of the Canberra campus of the Australian Catholic University, von Guttner is a historian of the early modern period of the Middle Ages, a time of great uncertainty.
But if there's one thing at which a historian must be particularly adept, it's spotting patterns of human behaviour, even as history ebbs and flows.
"I've been saying to my students for many years, and very often I was laughed at by my colleagues, when I say that, since we started thinking, a lot of our behaviours are following exactly the same pattern," he said.
"That yes, we perfected technologies, that's the only thing that we really changed, but human behaviour is, I think, still exactly the same as it was 1000 years ago.
"But we only see those patterns when we stumble upon something new."
When, in other words, they pass into history. The Queen only died a few months ago, but the event - monumental in anyone's book - has already become part of Nostradamus' famous poetric quatrains.
Climate change? It's still unfolding before our eyes, and while climate anomalies have happened before, notably in medieval times, we're yet to find out how our current predicament, wrought by humans, will look in the rear-view mirror.
It matters, in that it may well dictate how we behave, both now and in the future.
But ultimately, does it matter that one medieval astrologer responded to uncertainties of his time with some vague prophecies?
"Perhaps people were expecting a big cataclysm, some unprecedented event that is going to wipe out humanity, and Nostradamus was just responding to that need again," von Guttner says.
"Are we in a different age? Perhaps not, perhaps history repeats itself - that after one sort of disruption, we have another sort of disruption. But very often it comes almost like a mass demand for explanation, and when there's a crisis of authority...
"Nostradamus, conveniently, now gives us phrases and we see that the queen, who was very well advanced in her age, peacefully died.
"Some people seek solace in religious belief, and all sorts of religious belief, others play cards, and some others are taking life with a little bit of a laugh, others are looking for doomsday prophecies.
"I think it just demonstrates how we as a species are varied and we are not the same."
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