Today is grey and overcast. It has been Aussie-style summer now for a few weeks. I have loved the sunshine.

Yesterday, I headed off to the South Coast, where the Church of England Festival was on. Both the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London were speaking, and it was fantastic to see so many young people there amongst the 7,000 delegates. I am afraid the media are wrong. The church is not dying in this country, and it is doing an amazing job in prisons, amongst the marginalised, amongst those that the State has forgotten. Sorry, I just don’t accept that they are a bunch of self-righteous prigs.

Music plays a huge part in the festival. And as you know, I love music, moving to the beat. I am a disco queen at heart.

Just before my 40th birthday, we visited Down Under over New Year. Hugo was five and Anna was almost seven. We were hanging out in the communal garden which my brother Shaun’s family share with the Davis family, our mutual great friends. They built two identical houses together in their early twenties and, being friends, they did not bother to erect a fence. The result was a children’s paradise, where my children played every time they visited.

Gill Davis loves a party, but not the sort where you get plastered, the sort where you dance and have fun. She is my kind of gal. So as the evening wore on, the barbecue had gone cold, and we were all a little bored.

For as long as I have known the Davis family, they have kept a dress up box. They are born performers – their children have all entered the arts.

Before you could say “Cooee”, Gill had the three Sheilas dressed and ready to perform on the verandah, our impromptu stage.

We were dressed in as much ill-fitting, sparkly kit she could lay her hands on. The trio of ‘Gill, Sandy and Wendy’ came out with a bang. Think Meryl Streep’s trio in Mama Mia. We moved and sang through as many dance songs as Brett, Gill’s husband, could play.

The children sat in a row on a garden bench, agog at what was unfolding before them.

What was the reception? My children – they had never seen their mother ‘let her hair down’ like this in England. They displayed a mixture of awe, anxiety and admiration. The Potts and Davis children, didn’t bat an eyelid. They had seen it all before.

Eventually, all the children joined in on the ‘stage’, even Hugo, who was quite shy at that stage.

It has to go down as the best, and healthiest – we had no time to drink – New Year’s Eve party.

Today, I have a charity tennis match. It is in aid of preventing depression amongst young people. It is at a gorgeous house in Haslemere. It is like Manderley in the chilling book Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (filmed by Hitchcock). It has huge rhododendrons lining the driveway and framing the garden. A splendid place to play tennis.

And very English. As different as you could imagine to the garden I danced my heart out in almost fifteen years ago.