It's raining in Santa Marinella,

it's eleven pm, and I'm about to go to bed, and you have no idea how happy I am about it.

Evil Yellowface is defeated! All hail the gentle and benevolent god Greyroof!

It really can't be overstated how much difference it makes to everyone's lives when the weather changes at the end of August. It's very reliable. We get six to eight weeks of complete misery. Temperatures in the high 90s every day, humidity 80-90 per cent, we don't sleep, we don't go out, we move as little as possible. It's too hot even to go to the beach and swim.

Then one day, it's over, just like that, and we ex-pats come out of our caves, blinking owlishly and rubbing our tired eyes, and joyfully break out the cardigans. We leave each other notes on FB saying we feel like we've just woken out of a three-month-long fever-induced coma, and are looking around the world to see what has been going on since we went into our bunkers.

The forecasts had predicted the drop to happen on Friday night, so I went to bed at midnight to try to start shifting my schedule around to normal hours again. And, sure enough, right on schedule, about three am, I woke up, lying under my sheet with the fan going full blast as usual and rather muzzily thought, "What's wrong? What is this? I feel funny."

It took me, I swear, at least three minutes to figure out that I was ...

chilly!

I switched the fan off, (first time since June) and went and got a quilt from the cupboard.

It's the same every year. The only way to handle it, I've found, is to become effectively nocturnal. You sleep in the day, and by two am, the temperature is finally nice enough to make you feel at least a little perkier. You do housework, you write, you draw, you go for walks, between two and six am, go home, make something to eat, send a few emails, and go to bed about 7:30. You drop the blinds (which are more like blast shields) point the fan at the bed and take a melatonin and don't surface again until the late afternoon.

We went into the City today for Mass for the first time in three months. I can't tell you how wonderful it was to leave the house and not have to worry about getting fried by the Great Italian Death Ray.





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