Today the weather is lovely, so there will be plenty of tennis play, at Queen’s Club, this afternoon. Yesterday, British Andy Murray, and Australian Nick Kyrgios, won their matches. So I was happy.

Last night we had a great dinner with some Aussie friends, Gill and Gazza, at their fabulous penthouse apartment in Kensington.

The other Aussie guest was George Masselos, who recently joined Gazza in a charity bike ride over four days, 720 kilometers, from Bilbao to Barcelona. He’d come all the way from Sydney for the bike ride, in aid of the early detection of heart disease. They recently lost a dear friend to this affliction.

With my kangaroo card

George is a third generation Kytherian Aussie. The Peloponnese Island of Kythera, south of mainland Greece, only has 3,500 inhabitants, but in Australia, there are 60,000 people of Kytherian origin. There was a mass immigration from the island to Down Under in the first half of the 20^th century. George had all that Greek charm that Aussies love. And humour. We all laughed at a photo of kangaroos, taken at the ski resort of Thredbo, one looking like a boxer, about to beat the photographer up.

We have been to Athens and a few Greek Islands over the years and they are magical. But not Kythera. It’s now next on our list.

But in the early days of parenthood, our holidays were in Britain – the bucket and spade years. Either on the North Sea in Norfolk, around Stiffkey (pronounced Stookey) and Cley-next-the-Sea or Salcombe, Devon. It was too much of a hassle to transport all the children’s kit abroad.So it wasn’t exactly hot!

In June 1996, Mum and Dad, decided it was time to meet Hugo, who was six months old. I asked Emma whether she knew of any quintessentially English coastal towns, that Bev and Stan would enjoy. I could tell by the way her face immediately broke into a smile, that she knew the right answer. Without hesitation, she told me to take them to Salcombe, Devon. She had holidayed there her whole life. She insisted we use their family’s boat, which was moored in the harbour.

With their first grandson – Hugo

After hours of driving along the A303, then the M5, then inland through hedgerows on windy country lanes, we finally saw the signpost to Salcombe. The view from the summit surpassed our expectations. The vista below was breathtaking. There was the steeple of an ancient church, a pristine Victorian town painted in pastels and an aquamarine estuary (as good as the Bahamas), filled with sailing and motor boats.

We were enchanted!

It was so different to the surf beaches on the east coast of Australia. We ate cream teas in quaint teashops, sat on the beach while Anna played on the sand with a bucket and spade, drank beer in pubs that came right down to the water’s edge, caught a little red ferry from town to South Sands, near the heads, where a tractor, with bench seats, drove right into the sea to transport you to shore. We explored the interior mangrove estuary in Emma’s family boat as far up as South Pool, with its charming white washed pub. Dad would sit on the balcony and watch the dramatic tides for hours. In no time at all the outgoing tide left the boats marooned like beached whales on the mud flats.

Dad at the helm of the Keeling boat

English holidaying at its best. It was the beginning of a long association with Salcombe. Now modern, state of the art, houses are being built. Back then it was strictly Victorian or Edwardian architecture. In Australia, the same evolution is taking place on the Illawarra coastline, where my family live. Red brick bungalows are being replaced with clean edged, or New England style clapboard,abodes.

Dad loved Salcombe so much, that he was buried in a pair of trousers, his favourite pair, which he bought in a shipping style shop in town.

Today I’ll try to catch more of the action on tv at the Queen’s Club.