It is raining today.

But on Friday it was sunny and hot. The Book Club women arrived with their canine companions, and we spent the first hour bathing them as they rolled in fox excrement. The smell is mega offensive, to put it mildly.

Then we settled down to lunch. Someone had donated a beautiful bottle of rose, made at Angelina and Brad’s French vineyard.

We then headed to Scotland for Peter’s 60th birthday party on Saturday night at his Scottish baronial home. We started with drinks in the magnificent drawing room, with views over the River Doon cascading, like a waterfall, down the man-made weir. Ghislaine’s dress was breath-taking. It was her Belgian great grandmother’s, and it fitted her like a glove. It had small shimmering beads all over. She looked like a beautiful flower. My black velvet dress was drab by comparison.

At dinner, I sat next to Mike Marlin, a singer-songwriter, aged 55. He told me that he never finished his physics degree at Oxford. He left and went into the City, where he invented a computer programme that was very useful for investment banks. He obviously did well! But his latest career, which he started in his late forties, was to form a band. He recorded a cover of the Bee Gees hit ‘Stayin Alive’, which you will remember is very high pitched; they sound like a bunch of sheilas singing. Mike had the idea of recording it with his much deeper voice singing along. A record label heard it and signed him. He has been recording and performing ever since. His next gig was the supporting The Stranglers.

Leaving Oxford without a degree must have seemed pretty tragic to Mike at the time, but he defied the odds and went from strength to strength. By contrast, leaving the City for me, when Anna was four years old and Hugo was two, did not result in fame and glory. Instead it meant domesticity! I was a stay at home parent from then on, with a few interior design jobs on the way for others and renovating our own homes in Clapham, Chelsea, Fulham and Hampshire.

I approached parenthood, and creating interiors and gardens, with the same dedication and gusto I tried to practise law. I increasingly became a Tiger Mother. I micromanaged all aspects of the children’s life and development. I signed them up for every extra-curricular course I could find: singing for Anna; art for Hugo; football and cricket for Hugo, and tennis and swimming for both. I am not alone in channelling my own ambition into my offspring. But because I was foreign and didn’t know the form, how schools worked, where to find lessons, I was often behind the game.

The first club that Anna joined, aged two, was a singing group that met in a church in Fulham, run by a Sloane, Joya. The cherubs would sit on their mothers lap and sing sweet songs about sleeping bunnies etc. I met two great friends there through Emma – Sally and Jo. They are still my close friends today. It was a bonding time between mother and child, but oh no, not for me. As soon as the singing started Anna would jump up from my lap and sit on someone else’s lap. It was embarrassing in the extreme. We persevered though as Sally lived around the corner and invited us each week to tea, where her nanny cooked for the children. It was heaven not to have to cook nursery food once a week.

Today I am off to Nicky’s for lunch. And if it stops raining, I will dead-head the multitude of roses that have bloomed this year so gloriously.