When it’s summer and the humidity has steam-rollered you like a pancake and the sky seems to want to squash you, you can get this sudden change in Melbourne……we call it ‘the change’. We anticipate it, expect it, so when it doesn’t come and you know there’s another night of tossing between a thin top sheet and mumbling curses at the steam machine driver, that knowledge that it WILL come is what gets you through.

With the window open in my room above the street and the fan swivelling and whirring behind me, even then I sense it, the temperature drop- maybe ten degrees, and the smell of the sea fills the air- it usually comes in from the ocean, yes…… On the horizon of my hearing- is that a rumble of thunder, a complaint from the sky from the driver of the steamroller as he clashes with the maid of the bedsheet world? She wants to get all the corners tucked in nicely and he wants to obliterate every thing. Grumbles and curses in anger he does, and their full scale domestic begins. She throws a saucepan into the sky he shouts back a swear word, a sweep of her lightning broom washes the sky in ultra white , he cracks and crevasses in a Rio Grande crack and it goes on for a time. Bearded clouds of old man grey haunt the air hanging like Christmas decorations and then there’s rain, or sometimes preceded by hail..

On the tin roof it’s like a scurry of ants , a sweep, a knock , a prescience and then those drops click and clack away until it seems that a dam has been opened somewhere up there and it’s pouring down on us, though sometimes I have seen it come sideways. Once again that smell of the sea trapped in the clouds is released, All the heat trapped in the tired tar is released and that smell of trapped dirt and grime fills the air. Gutters swim in torrents of water and abruptly it might be over, just a brief cry from above, sometimes it goes further, but it’s like a spa bath for the soul, knowing the relentless press of humidity will soon abate. Open all the windows in the house to let those cool breezes wash and filter over our tired bodies, renew us….