I know I've already given you your daily dose by telling you about my leaky boat being ceaselessly borne back into the past, but that was before I stepped outside to smell the air. You see, it rained last night and everything looks fresh and green. And that smell in the air! (or petrichor, as my friend Des would call it) It makes you forget all about the other miseries in the world.
It takes me right back to a time more than half a century ago, before life had knocked the stuffing out of me, and before I had begun to feel all cynical and grumpy about everything. Of course, this magical moment won't last and soon the rest of the world will wake up too.
This magical moment, this gentle phasing out of the night and start to a new day, when I brew my first cup of tea - ginger with a touch of vanilla - and watch the porridge bubble on the stove, is my favourite time of day. Add the smell of petrichor — THAT word again! I can smell the scent of rain just by saying the word 'pet - ri - chor' — takes me back to many other rainy nights, and it reminds me of Eddie Rabbit and Singapore. (Strange how music reminds me of places: there's Miriam Makeba and South Africa; there's Lobo and Burma; there's is ... but I'm digressing!)
I first heard Eddie Rabbitt during my "Singaporean days" when I used to stay at the Raffles and supervise grain transhipments at Sembawang for my Saudi boss. Until that time I had been listening to the pop music of the eighteenth century - you know, Mozart's "Eine kleine Nachtmusik" and all that - but Singapore was awash with the sound of Eddie Rabbitt at the time and he had become something of an earworm.
I don't know what happened to Eddie Rabbitt since then but the music of Mozart is still around. And so is my love for rainy nights, but even more so for rainy days because rainy days give me an excuse not to sit on my ride-on and cut the constantly-growing grass but instead sit in my library and read a book. I hope it's going to be a long rainy day.
