My contact didn’t show. Or I’d somehow contrived to miss him. Whatever. And maybe, just maybe, this was the low point. The lowest.

   As I left the convention and returned to the entrance hallway, the heavens opened. Straight ahead, across an immense gloom, flooding in through the open main doors of the temple, there was an intense patch of light, the light of the world beyond, and this light was alive with a monsoon-like downpour.

   I stood there for a while in that vast stone lobby, just staring and listening, the immensity of the masonry defining this space almost overpowering.

   Eventually, I went and stood just over the threshold, not quite on the pavement, still within the shelter of the entrance portico.

   I’d not seen rain like it in years. Each time I thought it was letting up, it seemed to strain again and down it would come, more stinging and vicious than ever, sweeping and squalling in bands. It lashed so hard against the street that a mist formed close to the ground, theatrical drifts of dry ice, wisps of cold steam that wreathed and curled and were whipped away.

   I decided I’d try to brave it – and I made it as far as Victoria Street, where, though its gutters ran in torrents, the world was not quite yet ended – a solitary car passed while I stood there on the corner, its tyres hissing on the streaming road.

   But it was no good – I had to turn back. I stood again under the temple’s entrance canopy and smoked a cigarette. My fingers were so damp that I wet one side of its delicate paper as I fumbled it, coldly and clumsily, to my mouth.