There was torrential rain overnight. It is hot and humid today. It feels like there will be a thunderstorm later.

Yesterday’s Hurlingham Tennis Classic was a lot of fun – quintessentially English. Lopez versus Berdych, Sock versus Gasquet (who has the best back-hand, apart from Federer) and then doubles with the older players, including Bahrami, the Iranian exhibitionist. His trick shots and banter are hilarious!

I bumped into various women from Broomwood Hall days, in Wandsworth, wherever I went. There was one elegant mother queuing for sea food, who had been inspirational to many when it came to house renovations. Her entire family would camp out in a few rooms for months, while the rest of the house was gutted and transformed. She was visionary. They moved up the property ladder every time they sold.

Like a lot of Wandsworth women, I became an avid, amateur interior designer. I devoured the monthly issue of House and Garden. When we first moved into Elms Crescent in the Abbeville Village, to the east of Clapham Common, we could only afford necessary repairs – that meant nothing pretty. The roof needed replacing. The windows in a charming upstairs conservatory, overlooking the garden, were leaking and needed attention. The Victorian tessellated tiles in the hall had cracked and needed supporting from underneath via the cellar. Boring repairs!

When Hugo was six months old, my parents, Stan and Bev, came to meet him. They had met Anna when we all went to the Great Barrier Reef, where Hugo was conceived. After our memorable trip to Salcombe, they came to stay at Elms Crescent.

Stan could not sit still. He was a work-horse. The lawn was full of clover and he decided that it needed eradicating. He enlisted Geoff’s help. I went out for the day with Mum and the children. According to Dad, Geoff disappeared for a considerable period of time. He was eventually found, locked in the toilet, reading P. G. Wodehouse. Dad christened him ‘glass arms’, a term that stuck for years. When I came home, the lawn, instead of being green, was all dirt, with seed. I had a fit. Where would the children play over the summer? I had to wait for the grass to grow. It did grow and it was, indeed, free of clover.

When I started working in September 1997 for Blatt, Hammesfahr and Eaton, a Chicago law firm with a satellite office in the City, Geoff and I decided to renovate the upstairs conservatory. A few years later, over another summer time, we built on a downstairs conservatory. We decorated all the rooms over time. We put in utility room, with waterproofing, in the cellar. We changed the hedge in the front garden for iron railings. We landscaped the garden. We did everything that we could to improve the property. We didn’t camp in a few rooms whilst these renovations took place, but we did live with the builders. If you’ve done the same, you know the aggro.

Elms Crescent was a wonderful home when the children were young.

It felt like Stone House, Geoff’s childhood home. Even though it was in London.