I just opened the curtains to find a heavy frost on the lawn and the cricket ground beyond. Just like sparkling diamonds encrusted on emerald in the watery morning sunshine.

Yesterday the bloke came to quote on repairing the fence. Why is it always more than you hoped it would cost! Lunch at Anna’s godmother’s house in Winchester – always a tonic. Tennis training at 7pm – fun as usual, although freezing.  Floodlit outdoor courts.

Anna’s godmother is Nicola (Nicky) Barber.  She is worth writing about. She was my first Sloane friend. We shared the top floor of a flat in Battersea in 1988. I was fresh off the plane from Sydney. She’d relocated from Edinburgh to work at Sotheby’s on Bond Street. Her maiden name was St John. Not pronounced as it sounds. It is pronounced “Sin Gin”. Rowan Atkinson make a ‘dog’s dinner’ out of the surname in the Richard Curtis film Four Weddings and a Funeral.  Hilarious wedding scene where he is the vicar, and he repeatedly mispronounces the groom’s name.

My landlady, Lucy Hurst-Brown (double barreled of course), was adamant that Nicky and I would not get on, as we were too different: chalk and cheese.

Our first meeting was on a Sunday afternoon. I was lonely and cold, and had been watching television in the sitting room. I remember the first programme was Only Fools and Horses, which I’d never seen in Oz. It was the one where Del Boy and the gang hang chandeliers in a stately home, and they come crashing down. I laughed out loud. It became a fav tv show. The second program was a David Attenborough documentary on moles. In a deadpan voice he described how the male and female moles would find each other in a dark tunnel and copulate. The moles were screeching away and violently wrestling each other during his commentary. It was the contrast between his deadpan voice and the dramatic visual that riveted me. My first lesson in British understatement.

Geoff, Nicky and me at Frere Street, our flat in Battersea

Nicky had been away for the weekend. At the end of the 80s, single Sloanes invariably left London over the weekend. Nicky is tall, elegant, slender and has a cut glass accent. I am short, blonde (not natural anymore) and, at the time, I was tomboyish. We hit it off immediately. My first words to her were along the lines of, “Strewth, it’s cold in this house. Do you know how to turn on the fire?” Unbeknownst to me, Lucy only ever allowed it to be on if she had guests. Nicky, who is very law abiding, nevertheless took pity on me and turned it on.

She really took me under her wing. Her room was ordered and neat, with watercolours of Scotland, painted by her grandfather, hanging on the walls. My room had nothing in it. I just chucked the contents of my suitcase in the cupboard. Occasionally I would return home to find her white teddy bear “Fluffy” sitting up on my pillow case. Nicky felt sorry that I lived such a minamalist life. Sloanes adored knick-knacs back in the 80s and 90s. The more the merrier. They believed that clutter made things cosy.  

Nicky would always let me have the first bath. And I left it in a tip. Never rinsed it out, and left greasy remnants of blue Fengel bath oil for her. She made me Mighty White toast every morning with marmalade – a new taste for me. And then we rushed to catch the train. She would stride out, and I would almost have to run to keep up. Once on, I would chat away like a kookaburra at the top of my lungs, and she would indulge me until one day she said, “Sandra, people don’t talk on trains. They read the paper.” I had so much to learn.

So today I’m back up to London. Geoff and I are going to attend a ‘renewal of wedding vows’, and there will be a lot of old friends there. Then more friends for dinner.