Cooling cucumber and fennel with yoghurt

A friend and I went to visit his aunt one exhaustingly hot day in the Massif Central, in France. Climbing out of a sticky car, we’d arrived on a building site and hobbled over rubble covered in snakes of pipe. The sound of cicadas was deafening and the heat haze shimmered with unwavering intensity; the sun demanded you bow your head while the white dusty ground demanded you squint. There was nowhere to look and my legs were burning.

Lying next to a crusted cement mixer by an allurin