For months now, we’ve been teased.

Women have threatened to dance at wine o clock – wearing fascinators and feathers, their shoulders squared and a far-into-the-distance stare fixed on their botoxed faces.

Scientific puppetmasters have talked about (and possibly carried out) cloud seeding, in which steel lampshade-like ionisers create artificial clouds in the desert sky.

Then, last night, it finally happened: it rained.

And I slept through the whole thing, even the thunder and lightening that I’m told occurred.

It was nothing like a few years ago, when Dubai had hail stones so bad that all the cars were left with an ‘eggshell’ finish and we thought it was the end of the world.

But when we got up this morning, there was a strange darkness creeping round the curtains – Twitter was buzzing with rain tweets from Dubai-ians and the ground was actually wet.

The kids pressed their noses against the window and I joined them, peering out at the marvellous colours: the rain washes all the sand away and so instead of the tans and beiges we’ve been seeing recently, the trees and plants looked green. It’s like seeing your garden in technicolour and appreciating that it’s a lush oasis in the desert, not just a dusty yard.

Even the birds looked like they were dancing!

The world may watch us, rather bemused by our excitement, but when you live in a region where there’s only on average 13cm of rain a year, it’s the equivalent of a white Christmas every time it rains.

Ironically, DH was just off to Toronto and talking about sunscreen. They put it on in the cockpit as they fly over the North Pole apparently. I offered him one of my five or six bottles of sun tan lotion, before waving him off to the airport – and seeing the boys off to school.

Then I sat down with a cup of tea, my eyes glancing skywards at the grey clouds gathered above, and enjoyed an atmospheric, almost romantic (!) couple of hours on the laptop – the ground, by now, completely dry again and not a spot of rain in sight.

Oh well, there’s always next year.