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and, through the trees, saw the sky heavy with black clouds. The first big drops caught up with us at the exit to the park. There was no wind at all and the rain fell perpendicularly, like a barber ’s curtain that doesn’t let you see more than ten yards in front of your nose. At the edge of the pavement, we were stopped by a current of water. In less than five minutes, Kononos Street had turned into a tributary of Filolaou Street that had itself become a torrential river.
    ‘How are we going to get across?’ I asked Adriani. ‘Just look at it.’
    She grabbed me by the hand and pulled me into the entrance of an apartment block. ‘Wait here, I’ll be back,’ she said and ran off to the supermarket three doors away.
    I was wondering whether she had gone to buy a child’s inflatable canoe when I saw her coming out with a handful of empty plastic bags.
    ‘Lift your leg up,’ she said, slipping one of them over my shoes and fixing it with a rubber band as though wrapping up a frozen chicken. Any resistance on my part was greeted with a ‘Shh, I know what I’m doing!’ and she moved on to the second foot.
    ‘You’re mad if you think I’m going to dive into that river with plastic bags for flippers,’ I told her.
    ‘You’re not the only one. Just look around you!’
    And she pointed to one woman who was fording the river with plastic bags on her feet and one over her head.
    ‘Be thankful that I had the good sense to bring an umbrella,’ Adriani boasted.
    The situation overcame all my resistance and in a minute we had crossed over, two pusses-in-boots struggling not to be swept away by the current.
    In spite of the umbrella and the plastic bags, we were drenched and once home, we changed our clothes and got out the ointments. Meanwhile the rain had stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the sky in the west was clear and deep red.
    This is the most boring part of the daily routine as I don’t know what to do to pass the time. I somehow manage to get by till midday by dragging breakfast out till ten and then with the help of the papers and my dictionaries. After lunch, I usually lie down for a while. I never sleep, but I shut my eyes and keep them closed for a couple of hours to fool myself into believing that I’m asleep. This is followed by my appointment with the cat. It’s from returning home to the evening news bulletin that there’s a black hole that I can’t find anything to fill. I thumb through the dictionaries for a bit. Then I pick up the paper, but I’ve already read it inside out. There’s always the crossword, but that only makes me even more irritated as I’m completely useless at it. Not to mention that I feel personally offended at not being able to find the right word after so many years delving into dictionaries. At the third attempt, I end up throwing the paper from the bed towards the door or from the sitting room into the hall, depending on where in the house I am. Then the next day at the same time I start again, a real sucker for punishment.
    And that was the case then. I was looking at the squares and I felt more like playing at battleships, like at school, because I couldn’t find even one word. After ten minutes, furious with myself, I flung the paper into the hall.
    ‘Why do you bother racking your brains like that, when you know you can’t do it?’ I heard Adriani’s voice coming from the kitchen. She was the ever-vigilant eye in the house that sees all and misses nothing.
    I was comforted by the fact that, because of the downpour, the news bulletin would at least be different from the usual and we’d see rivers, flooded basements and buckets, but my delight exhausted itself after four shots, as the afternoon deluge had lasted barely half an hour. By the time the camera crews had arrived, the rivers running down the streets had dried up. I prepared myself to hear for a third time the same news stories that I had read in both the morning and evening papers, but the