Heatwave, Adelaide: Forty-Four Degrees and a Broken Air Conditioner

11 am. Forecast top of forty-four. Adelaide in January is a different planet. The roads shimmer, the magpies hide, and everyone moves like they're underwater. I had three bookings in the diary and a freezer full of iceblocks. I thought I was prepared.

2.15 pm. The air conditioner made a noise like a sigh and stopped. I pressed every button. I turned it off and on again. I said several words I won't write here. The room temperature climbed a degree every twenty minutes.

Plan B

2.30 pm. Rang the repairman. Earliest visit is Thursday, which is two days away. Rang my friend Anna, who runs a small private studio in the eastern suburbs with good ducted cooling, and asked, sheepishly, whether I could borrow a room for the afternoon. She said, "Get over here, there's cold watermelon."

3 pm. Messaged my clients individually. Explained the situation, offered a new address with the same time and the same terms, or a free reschedule if they preferred. One rescheduled to next week. Two were happy to meet at Anna's. Nobody was cross. Heatwaves make people generous. Everyone's suffering together.

The evening

5 pm. First booking. He arrived with a bag of ice from the servo, which I thought was adorable. We spent the first ten minutes just sitting under the air conditioning vent with our eyes closed, groaning with relief. Then we laughed about it, and after that the ice was well and truly broken. The rest of our time was relaxed, cool and very pleasant.

8 pm. Second booking, a regular. He brought a frozen bottle of water for each of us. It's funny how kind people are when the weather's brutal. We spent a little while on Anna's back verandah afterwards as the cool change finally rolled in, the wind swinging round to the south and the temperature dropping ten degrees in fifteen minutes. The whole street came outside to feel it.

Night

10.30 pm. Helped Anna change the linen and restock the room, and left a bottle of wine and a thank-you card on her bench. That's the currency between friends in this work: favours returned, always.

Drove home with the windows down and the cool air pouring through. My flat is still an oven, so I'm sleeping on the floor in front of a pedestal fan with a wet tea towel on my forehead.

Honestly? It was a good day. Things went wrong, and everyone was kind anyway.