The weather today is stable.

On Friday I prepared for a busy weekend at the Old Rectory. Anne, my first friend from Aussie, came with her girls for Saturday: to play tennis and sit in the garden with their dogs, Max and Lucy. Patrick, Geoff’s baby brother, also headed south with his family, including his part wolf, to see us. Geoff loves this sibling.

I threw cushions and blankets on the lawn for us to sprawl on, and I cut fresh, sweet-smelling roses for vases and dotted them around the house.

Geoff mowed the lawn into stripes. There were no wasps to ruin the scene. It was idyllic. The weather was dry.

We ate chicken and salad, plus summer pudding (summer fruits coated in white bread that soaks up the juices), played tennis and periodically checked what was happening over the fence in the adjacent cricket pitch. As Anne summed it up, “Summertime is the sound of leather on willow.” She was referring to cricket. A sport that both Britain and Australia are crazy about.

There is something magical about the British countryside in the summertime, when the conditions are good. When the clouds and rain depart!

In the spring of 2000, Anna fell off her bike and split her forehead open – just before we were due to fly to Australia for Easter. It is too upsetting to write about in detail. She had a Harry Potter angry scar. I was finding it impossible to find a good plastic surgeon to restitch it. It had been done badly by a nurse at a local hospital in Sevenoaks. A friend of a friend suggested a Harley Street surgeon who could revise it. He apparently did a number of face-lifts for actors. He was brilliant. When every surgeon we initially consulted said, “Impossible to fix.” He said, “I can (not think) make it a lot better.” You can’t notice it now unless you look very carefully.

However, the whole episode wrung me out. At about the same time, our friends, the Fothergills, offered us their cottage in the Cotswolds for a peppercorn rent. They were living in South Africa. We jumped at the chance to be in the middle of nowhere on weekends.

I loved London, but I was tired of trying to navigate it with two small children and no help. And no grandparents living locally. So off we went periodically to one of the prettiest parts of England. It was a tonic.

I loved Stone House, Geoff’s family home, and I loved this pretty cottage in the middle of Paxford, a hamlet near Moreton-in-Marsh. It became a friend. It even reminded my Auntie Wilma’s farm near the Outback, where I found my pet kangaroo. At night, the wind would catch the wheat in the next door field outside, and I would watch it sway like the Pacific Ocean.