I am a Kiwi who has lived in the Uk for quite some time. I am always happy to come home and delighted to see both friends and family and catch up with all things Kiwi, especially our great All Blacks.
I do feel however, that I need to speak out about what I see as antiquated views concerning the UK especially their weather.
I hate to tell you all this, but without a doubt , I have never felt as cold here in the UK as I did as a child living in Wellington.
The wind there (Wgtn) can cut you in two and the chill factor takes whatever the temp is down even farther. I have never felt that here where I live in the South of england and the only exception was Edinburgh and that was only once. We dont suffer from the wind chills here in the South of England as you do there in NZ and when the temp does drop, it’s often that sunny, cold, frosty day that tingles your skin, with little or no wind and when we get home from being outside all our homes are central heated. I am always shocked that people visiting from NZ arrive with thick dressing gowns and woolen slippers, none of which you need here. I forget that the homes in NZ can be damp as they are not well insulated from the weather there nor do most have any kind of central heating throughout the entire house (usually only the living room/hall or kitchen) not bedrooms etc…
But this is the thing I would really like to people to understand about here (UK), the weather here can be weird, it can be changeable (very at times) but every year since I have been here (which has been a while now over 15 years), we frequently get temps over 26-28 deg cel and most years we now get temps that are over 30 deg cel.

Now these temps may only last a couple of weeks and some years they are in strange months like March-April but they are consistently present every year.

I have frequent contact with family in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch who tell me about the weather and what it is like there and guess what….it is never consistent loads of rain, howling wind and can be at times be freezing. Now with little or no heating/insulation in NZ homes, that makes life cold, most certainly do not have heating throughout the house (I hear some people even still have electric blankets, was shocked they still existed), damp up the walls, etc.. etc..

I don’t want to go on and my purpose was not to cheese you off, I just wanted to get facts straight, loads of kiwis take the mickey out of UK weather and its usually from those with little or no experience of actually living here (holidays don’t count lol)

That just about equals the warmest temperature in Auckland all summer!

One guy from there once told me they’d had a ‘heatwave’ – i.e it got to 28 degrees!