I Love the Smell of Ozone in the Evening.

Darkening sky heralded the approaching summer storm. 

'Looks like rain', she announced cheerfully. It was about 15 minutes before knock-off, the cleaner had already arrived,  and there seemed to me to be no reason to delay getting our skates on, but delay she did.

Bash bash bash away at the keyboard, some muttering and frantic flipping of pages, then the usual range of imprecations to try and extract me from the igloo and eventually we were out the door. A slight further delay was incurred pushing her sun hat (which I now know is made of woven paper) deep into Donkey's storage and we opened the front door to be greeted by intense heat, high pressure, flash bulbs going off everywhere, and deep rumbling overhead.

Oooooohhh great, I love a good electrical storm. It makes my fur stand up and you get to smell the ozone.

Water fell from the sky in a few sporadic droplets - nothing you could describe as rain. We got at least one really good flash☆crack directly overhead as we started up the hill, and the flash bulbs kept going off everywhere else like a rock concert, but the rain held off until we were about halfway home. I'll give her credit, she had prepared. There was a huge folded beach towel hanging on Donkey which she pulled over me to keep most of the rain off, and we dived into the next available covered doorway to sit it out.

F took her red shoes off while we sat and they went into Donkey to join the hat. They aren't made of paper but she didn't want them water stained. Unfortunately for fire fighters, people who wanted it to cool down,  and gardeners, the real rain didn't last a full 5 minutes and we were soon underway again.

Try to picture this: a woman who remembers flower power paddling up a wet street (street mind,  NOT footpath) in the last of the rain, wearing a flowing sort of hippy dress, no hat no shoes, pushing a cat wrapped in a colourful beach towel along in a cat version of a 'buggy'.

People taking their early evening tipple outside but under the awning of the traditional locals' food/bar/cafe on the corner were waving to us and laughing and shouting. They have businesses in this street - we greet them all in the mornings on our way down the hill. 

Within an hour the sky was again blue, the wind that briefly followed the 'storm' had gone, the streets had largely dried out, and the atmosphere was again hot and breathlessly still.

And we could hear crickets at last.