It's raining.

I love the sweet musty smell that lingers after the first few rains of the year. The sharp fresh tang hanging in the air, after the long, hot, humid, sometimes fetid, summer.

I don't think it has rained here since the beginning of April. I love the sun, don't get me wrong; but there's nothing like the occasional sting of raindrops against the face...

All through the spring and early summer, the newspapers here were reporting about the critical water shortage, with the Kinneret - the Sea of Galilee, dropping to unprecedented levels. If it passes a predetermined red line, the newspapers reported breathlessly, the nation will be plunged into a crisis.

And so it came to pass. And nothing happened. Chastened by their apocalyptic predicitons failing to pass, the journalists sidled off to sensationalise something else. And Israelis continue to hose their 4X4's down...

(Don't be deceived by the last line - I'm no environmentalist. But I am often bemused by the proliferation of gas-guzzling motor cars and water wastage schemes in this country, given the dependence upon oil and the absence of natural water deposits that plague the country and to some extent influence its political relations with the neighbours...)

Paul McCartney performed in Tel Aviv last night. Didn't go - tickets cost too much. Instead, I went for a nice little encounter with the writer Matt Benyon Rees. Detective novels are not really to my taste, but after the entertaining evening - enlivened even further by an eccentric fellow who kept piping up that the real Palestinians are the Jews, that the Palestinians are actually the Amalekites and that eventually, Gog and Magog...ah, forget it - I'll certainly be checking his books out. I drove back home through literally deserted streets. Everyone in The Bubble, it seems, had gone to sing along to 'Live and Let Die'...

Thumbs Aloft!