Rain on the roof

For the last four years I have lived in a ground-floor apartment and one of the things I have missed is the sound of rain on the roof, or even on the ground as the apartment was well-insulated. In the last two weeks I have had rain wherever I have been so I have listened to it in Sydney at my sister's apartment; in KL, first at the airport hotel where a lengthy, heavy downpour woke me up and at first I thought I'd gone to sleep with the air conditioning on, then in my Chinatown hotel when the skies opened late one night sending the stall holders racing for the umbrellas and their cars to pack their goods in. This last night I was supposed to be going over the road to watch the All Whites last game but I had gone to sleep waiting for the 11.30 start time and the intensity of the rain and the flimsyness (flimsiness?) of the cafe's roof sent me back to bed.



Last night I slept in London for the first time and woke again some time in the early morning to the sound of rain. Lying listening to rain, knowing I don't have to get up and go out in it is one of my greatest pleasures, more refreshing than sleep. What is the opposite of a camel? I am a creature who needs moisture - rain, morning dew, the ocean lapping around me - these are my times of renewal, of optimism. I spent four and a half years in Sydney in the '90s, four of them years of drought, and had no idea that much of my sense of displacement, of anticipation and disappointment was my craving for real seasons, for morning chill and the freshness of dew on grass. Of course sometimes in Wellington when the rain came every day for three weeks and the washing never dried and I had to towel-off the cat several times a day I thought of those endless sunny days in Sydney...