This was the third time she had left the very average Sydney hotel without her rain coat and the third time she had needed it. How can the sun so often hide its face halfway through its dayshift? she wondered.

Where she came from, its rays barely made it down to her balcony; they got lost somewhere in the blanket above, in the bitter grey. She and her neighbours hadn’t seen a cloud slide across a blue sky for years. Here, in this city, on this beach, the sun was like a slap from a hand whose veins bulged with heat and precision and determination. The sky was bluer than she’d ever seen. Its rays would incinerate the roller awning on her balcony, she suspected, before deciding she’d happily forfeit the old blind for a morning of sky and a world above.

Only, within the last five minutes, as her bus waited in line to slot into a parking spot on Bondi Beach’s corniche, the blue had bruised and large, wet drops began purposefully hammering onto the coach roof. She climbed down from the air-conditioned chill, made her way across the concrete footbridge, carefully avoided joggers and skateboards licking their way past prams – mums running towards shelter – down onto the famous sand and allowed herself to get wet.