I watched two terrible horror movies on pay TV, just to guarantee my evening would be a total write-off, then I went to bed too early, before I was sleepy. I tossed and turned for hours, unable to clear my mind of Ravel’s Bolero which had been overused in one of the films I’d just seen and kept going through my head, insistent, hypnotic and exhausting.

The next day it was raining buckets, as they used to say when I was a child. A heavy August rain, not really ­refreshing. Diagonal nails of water flattened on hitting the sidewalk, tracing on the windows sweepings of liquid dust that would dry and leave a powdery residue made up of every form of pollution that infects Montreal.

In the past, a summer rain was usually welcome. When I was a teenager I’d often go for walks in a downpour, without an umbrella, just to feel the water pour over my face. I would drink it in, open-mouthed, as I headed for Parc Lafontaine or Parc Laurier. I could walk like that for hours without getting tired. When I came home, soaked to the skin, my mother would yell at me to dry myself properly or I’d catch my death, if not pleurisy or double pneumonia, depending on her mood. Nowadays the rain scares me. You just have to look at the burnt, pitted, sticky leaves on the trees in Outremont and you’ll lose any urge for a bucolic stroll to clear your head. At Mélène and Jeanne’s place, where there’s no roof over the gallery, the acid rain leaves a sticky deposit that’s especially revolting.