Hello… So I had a dream last night. I woke up and thought that if I had a blog site it would be good place to share it. And then that got me thinking, “Why not do a blog?”

I am half way through a stalled book: Confessions of a Sloane Sheila, about an Australian, Matilda, who falls in love with a Viscount, but she doesn’t know he’s a Viscount when she falls in love with him. They meet at a bar at the Four Seasons hotel in Sydney, down by Circular Quay, on a Friday night after work.

A bit like Mary falling in love with Prince Frederick of Denmark, and becoming Princess Mary, and then giving birth to princes and princesses, and living in a castle in Copenhagen.  The story goes that Fred chatted up Mary in a pub in Sydney during the 2000 Olympics. She didn’t know who he was, so she fell in love with the real him; before she knew he had all the goodies. And now she wears a crown and speaks Danish I guess. So she can actually understand Danish Noir television, like Borgen and The Killing, without reading the subtitles.

I’m digressing. I often ‘go walkabout’, so you will just have to learn to bear with me.

So, I am a middle aged female – Sandra. I’m from a nondescript suburb in Sydney.  As a child and teenager, my skin was scorched by the Australian sun. I often had green hair from swimming in over-chlorinated pools which would then get bleached out in the sea water at the beach. 

Stanley (Stan the Man) and Beverley (Bev) – Australians tend to shorten words, e.g., arvo for afternoon etc., are my parents, and I have a brother, Shaun, who was a surfer Adonis in his prime.

I trained as a lawyer in Sydney.  At 26 years of age I met Geoffrey Wilmot at a wedding, at the Hurlingham Club, in London. He was the best man. I was the bridesmaid. We got married and moved to Clapham. We had two children, Anna and Hugo. And then we moved to Chelsea. Not the posh end near Peter Jones, but down near World’s End in Limerston Street. 

After Geoff changed jobs in 2013, we sold our Chelsea house and bought an old butcher’s shop in Fulham (the blood had gone) and an Old Rectory in Hampshire, and then I almost killed myself overseeing the renovations. I have dabbled in the world of interior design. Without formal training, I decided that it was unwise to start a business.

So that is my potted background. The rules of the blog are that I should try to write no more than one page, or you will get bored, and I will digress. I should tell you what happened the day before and what is about to happen in the next twenty four hours, and then I’ll report on how it turned out. I will have weekends off, or I might go loopy.

You will learn about the first half of my life in Australia, the Australian years, and the next half in Britain, married to a toff. So there will be flashbacks. And you will get to glimpse how an Aussie Sheila has coped in the land of the Sloanes. 

Help, I am almost at the end of the page… So in the dream, I discovered that I was in Brazil. I was living with a family in a poor area. Their car, in the garage, turned into a bed at night. Their daughter explained to me that people who lived in the area where the street numbers started with “190” were wealthy.  There were three districts: the rich one, the middle one and the poor one. And you were prohibited from building a nice house in the bottom two, so the houses never changed, and everyone got stuck where they were.  What does it mean? 

I am at the Old Rectory at the moment. A landscape man is going to come and give me a quote on a fence that’s fallen over. And I am off to Winchester to see Anna’s godmother for lunch, and tonight I have training with the C team at Steep Tennis Club. So I am over one page, but it is the first blog!!!