There is no morning cool. It is warm like soup at seven a.m. It will be thirty-five degrees by ten o'clock, and forty by noon. We won't see the Communist Party evangelist with his grey coat and leaflets for the next few days! Even the crows and the seagulls have not come to McDonald's for breakfast. The water birds are gone despite the green bordered waterhole and its dribble of creek. 

Later, in the sprinkled artificial green of the Botanic Gardens, I will see newborn ducklings barely two inches long. But out here there is no hint of anything new, just life-shrivelling aridity. The train arrives in a great roaring aura of hot diesel and rippling air.  

At midday the heat flattens the sounds of the traffic. At five the tops of my ears will burn as I walk home and my eyes will still sting in the heat.

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