It is bright and sunny this morning at the Old Rectory, but there is a distinct chill in the air.

The light though is crisp and sharp, reminding me of our time in Provence, in the first year of our marriage. I had in my mind’s eye Monet’s The Luncheon (seen at the Musee d’Orsay last weekend) as I passed by the empty garden table by the meadow, now mown. If only life was so elegant nowadays.

 

In 2010, when we took the children to Paris, we also took the high speed train to St Remy afterwards.

This was the same trip when Madame Secretary pronounced “NON”, that it was simply “impossible” to allow us to use the facilities at the Cercle de l’Union Interalliee members’ club, despite having an introductory letter from the Hurlingham Club.

On the day of departure it was pouring with rain. When we arrived at the train station, the passengers were barred from going onto the platform, until the last minute. The surge of bodies when the barrier was lowered was like the first day of the Harrods Sale; survival of the fittest. Who cared if you trampled over your fellow man or woman to reach your seat?
We asked a railway official on the platform whether we were at the correct carriage for our pre-booked tickets. “NON, you are on the wrong platform. This is not your train.” We set off at pace to reach the next platform, to be told, “NON,” you need to go to the next platform.” He was pointing to the platform we had originally been on.

We legged it back to the spot on the platform where we had first set off. The whistles were blowing, the doors were about to close, everyone was now on the train. I just yelled, “Get on.” So we threw our bags on and followed with our bodies. We landed in a wet, messy heap.

We were, ‘surprise surprise’, in the correct carriage!

St Remy was beautiful. People talk about the light in Provence. It is where many of the Impressionists and post-Impressionists headed to paint: including Vincent Van Gogh. After he had an attempt at cutting off his ear, he went to stay at the Saint-Paul Asylum. He was very ill when he went there, but he still managed to paint some exquisite art, including Starry Night over the Rhone. I was enthralled by a similar one at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. When I stumbled on the painting, the words to an old Don McLean song flooded back, “Starry, starry night. Paint your palette blue and grey, Look out on a summer’s day, With eyes that know the darkness of my soul.” He suffered so. Is there sometimes a link between brilliance and depression?

 

Our little hotel, very basic, happened to be across the road from Saint-Paul. We went to see Van Gogh’s room, where he stayed most of the time. It too was basic, and it was unlike the cheerful painting of it displayed at the Musee d’Orsay. The grounds were beautiful, and although nature is said to heal, it did not heal him. They failed to still the desperate ruminations of his mind.

We did very little in St Remy other than swim in the pool, play cards and board games, and eat delicious food.

And at night, we looked at the same stars that Vincent Van Gogh, a genius, gazed at from his small, lonely room.

Today is sun and rain. But it is warm, and it is expected to be a warm October.

I have a lot of cooking to do today. Not my favourite activity. I am no Nigella.  I am certainly not a Domestic Goddess.

Hugo became firm friends with Nigella’s son, Bruno, when he was at Sussex House, over a decade ago now.

I once asked him what Nigella had cooked for dinner. He said that she didn’t cook all the time, as that was her profession.

Once, when I went to collect him from tea, I walked into the hall to see a weird looking woman with a baby in a pram down the corridor. I said hello, but she rudely ignored me. I said in the car to Hugo, “Gosh, that woman in the corridor with the baby was rude. She didn’t answer when I said hello.” Hugo replied, with some degree of exasperation, “Mum that is a wax work.” I was amazed.

Another time I went on a Sunday morning to collect him from a sleepover. I rang the doorbell. Charles Saatchi answered the intercom. For some unaccountable reason I said it was Sandra, but I said my name with an Aussie hard ‘a’, and not a soft ‘a’. He buzzed me in, just as I heard him yell, “Hugo your nanny is here to collect you.”

Hugo did not appear. He was obviously sound asleep. What could I do? I couldn’t very well go upstairs and look for him. So I sat down on the bench in the hall. This time, I was sitting next to a wax older gentleman. He was so life like it was unnerving. He had crepey skin on his arms and neck. He was hunched over, holding a paper bag. He looked exhausted. I marvelled at his realism.

After 45 minutes, I saw Hugo run across the landing to the loo (toilet) presumably. I yelled out, “Hugo, please come right now.” It was my only chance to retrieve him, and I was not going to squander it.

When Hugo was turning 13, I asked where he would like to go for his birthday. Without batting an eyelid, he said, “China Tang at the Dorchester.” He’d been there with them. And other good restaurants. He ate a lot of good food in their company.

When Bruno came to stay with us, I once asked him what he’d like for breakfast. He asked for pancakes with blueberries. I actually make a pretty good pancake. I was taught by my grandmother, Vera, my mother’s mother. I could woof down at least ten of hers as a child. No wonder I was a pudgy teenager.

As he ate away, contentedly, Bruno asked, “I am a bit confused. Are you Hugo’s mother or the nanny.” He obviously had met a few Aussie nannies. I wasn’t cross. I just laughed.

Bruno loved to talk about the sea and surf. He wanted to be a surfer. He often talked about Italy, where they holidayed, as Nigella is partly Italian. (Geoff was delighted to be standing behind Antonio Carluccio, another Italian chef on television, in Waitrose recently.)

I was happy to talk to Bruno about one of my favourite subjects, the sea, and I knew a lot of surfers growing up. He was enthralled as I told him about my brother Shaun’s fearless pursuit of the perfect wave, often at the expense of his face. He once came home having split his forehead on a reef. He still has a small scar between his eyes.

So, I better put a shopping list together soon.

 

Warm and sunny today. It was like that on Saturday in Paris. 25 degrees, and it is almost October.

I spent the morning walking around the first arrondissement on Saturday in Paris.

On that walk, I went to see the newly refurbished Ritz. I, of course, had to get past the bodyguard on the door. No easy task.

“Hello,” I said. “Could I possibly look around the renovations?” The bodyguard looked uncertain. “Yes,” he said. “As long as you do not take any photos.”

In I went. Perfection unfolded before me.

What a tour de force. It was faultless.

However, sometimes, life is stranger than fiction. I was gazing at the newly panelled corridor.

And then I turned to my left. On two seats. A man in a pink jacket. Beside him in a pink quilted carrier bag, a poodle with pearls around its neck. Only in the Ritz.

But sometimes dreams really come true. Like when I turned 41 and I was there in Paris with Anna. She was a girl then, a woman now. I wish that I could bottle that moment in front of the Eiffel Tower. It was joyous. Joy is so wonderful. It is bubbly and effervescent.

I then went on to the Musee d’Orsay to see the Impressionists and the post- Impressionists. What a setting for great art. Through the transparent clock window, as the building was once a train station, and you must make sure the trains are on time, you could see Sacre Coeur in the distance – white pillars of serenity over the city.

I wish that for Paris. I wish that for us all. Peace and good will to all men!

If only that we could live that out daily.

Today, I have more tennis. And that will be a tonic. Radio 4 have conducted a survey of 18,000 people as to their main forms of rest, ‘the rest test’, which leads to well being. Games is one of them. As that stops you thinking about problems and what people think of you. Maybe that is why I am often in tennis shoes.

 

Today, I awoke to rain.

Yesterday, I caught up on life post-Paris. Jobs to do; that meant saying NO to a lot of things I would have preferred to do. I would have loved to have had a swim. Wash away the cobwebs of travel. It was not to be.

A few years back, Geoff was on a conference in Paris, in the Opera quarter. It was a hop and a skip from the Cercle de l’Union Interalliee, the club I visited in Paris this past weekend. We had the children with us, then in their teens. Off we set, excitedly, to enjoy its reciprocal hospitality, which the Hurlingham offers to their members, when they are in London.

In we walked, through the enormous gates to a majestic building, right next to the President’s palace.

Geoff speaks pretty good French. He studied it along with German at Durham Uni. He explained that we had a letter of introduction from the Hurlingham Club in London, and we would like to have lunch and a swim. The concierge looked downcast. As if Geoff had slapped him across the face or insulted him.

He gravely said, “I cannot let you in without the secretary’s permission.”

Geoff said, “That is fine. We can speak to the secretary.”

He said, with a very stern face, “She is not here until tomorrow.”

Fine, we thought; we will come back tomorrow, and go to the Marais region today; the Place des Voges and Notre Dame.

Off we went, a bit irritated, but there was always tomorrow.

Fast forward to the next day; tomorrow had arrived.

We were shown into the secretary’s office. We showed her the letter of introduction from the Hurlingham Club. Madame Secretary acted as if we had committed a heinous crime, that warranted an imminent beheading at the Place de la Concorde.

She was a large woman, shall we say, with enormous bosoms, which she rested her crossed arms upon, like a shelf.

Geoff started again: “We are from the Hurlingham Club, and we would like to take the children for a swim in the pool and have some lunch.”

Her considered answer: “NON.” Finito. No. Final. Forget it.

Geoff, ever the gentleman, politely asked: “So when can we come and use the club.”

Her considered answer: “You could have used the pool yesterday (when we had originally come) and on Thursday.”

We were leaving on Wednesday. I had steam coming out of my ears.

Fast forward a few years later to our next visit to Paris. It is now May 2013. I am determined to swim in that pool and to eat at the Interalliee at all costs.

Reverse back to when we had returned from our unsuccessful attempt to visit the Interalliee. I immediately checked with the Hurlingham Club membership office, and we had been entitled to used the club any day of the week. Mrs Madame Secretary obviously didn’t like Anglais bodies, plus one Aussie, in their over-chlorinated pool.

I was determined on the next trip to use that pool and eat their food. Fast forward back to May 2013 to the next trip to Paris. We are this time, given access to the Interalliee.

So Geoff and I have a nice bite to eat, and then it is time for our dip, just before we have to catch the Eurostar back to London. I lock my suitcase and passport etc in a locker and head for some laps. When I go to unlock the locker after the swim, I have, moronically, forgotten which locker my possessions are in.

Just remember, at this point I am dripping wet, and Geoff by now is waiting anxiously in the reception of the club for me. I see a woman in a nice black dress and black court shoes.

I ask her, “Can you help me? Do you work here?” She looked at me with disgust and uttered, “Do I look like I work here!” as she pointed to her svelte body. She marched away without a second glance at the desperate, drenched, dripping woman, who did not speak French.

I ran and found the lifeguard. She is paid to help. She explained to me that we had two chances to put my code into the correct locker, and after that, the they all locked for ten minutes. She is obviously thinking to herself, “What a plonker.” In French, of course.

I entered my code into the first locker. I am unsuccessful. I try the next locker. I am unsuccessful. We wait it out another ten minutes, until I can try two more times. I get it on the third. I change at speed. Forget the blow dry.

I find Geoff pacing in one of the salons. I don’t explain. We have to dash for our train. I look like a drowned rat. The Parisian women on Rue Fabourg, the equivalent of Mayfair, look at me in horror as we run to find a taxi.

Today, I can go and enjoy the Hurlingham Club and play some tennis. If I hear a French voice, well, I shall just smile. No need to be rude!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Summer was like a flakey friend. She left while I was away in Paris. Couldn’t be bothered to wait to say goodbye!

It is distinctly more autumnal this morning. This seasonal shift was confirmed when I arrived last night at the Old Rectory, having returned from Paris, to see that the Sweet Pea Lady, down the road, sadly, had taken down her summer time teepees. Each year she lays out rows of wicker teepees in her front garden, and when the blooms appear, she cuts them and puts them in jam jars, on a wooden trolley, outside her front gate; they are £1 per bunch. They make our house full of sweet scent.

Hugo has moved into ‘digs’ near Warwick Uni; I shall miss him. Another disappearance!

The days are getting shorter. Instead of nudging 10pm, at sundown, at the height of the summer, it was pitch black by 8pm last night.

Paris was warm and balmy, on Friday night, on arrival around 5pm. It was still summer.

The hotel was just off the Tuilleries Gardens in the 1st arrondissement, midway, near the Place de la Concorde. The sight of greenery in the park enticed me to walk to the end of the street. I could see the roof of the Grand Palais to the right and the Eiffel Tower further afield.

That is Paris for you. Everything that matters is compacted into the heart of it, like a treasure chest, so that all your eye beholds is beauty, and it feels at the end of your fingertips. As if you could stretch and stroke it. As I stood there, I felt that I could reach for the Louvre to the left, a bit further to Notre Dame Cathedral on its little island, the Musee D’Orsay straight over the Seine on the other side of the Tuilleries, the Arc de Triomphe to the right up the avenue and the Opera behind me over my left shoulder; a bit further afield on a tall hill, if I really stretched, the Taj Mahal-like Sacre-Coeur Basilica, watching over the city.

The city is neatly and precisely designed and formed; it is meticulous, mechanical, an equation that adds up to perfection. Unlike London, which is an ad hoc splattering of satellite gems. It is spare like Coco Chanel’s original creations.

All around me, the sound of French voices. What is it with the French language? The language of love? It is so beautiful when articulated. Even if the telephone book was being read, it would sound like Proust to my untrained ear.

Travel is tiring. I was early to bed. I had a score to settle in the morning. I needed to muster my strength. As a member of the Hurlingham Club, I am entitled to the reciprocal hospitality of a number of clubs around the world. They can come to the Hurlingham, and we can go to them. One of these clubs is the Cercle de L’Union Interalliee, on the smartest street in Paris, the rue du Faubourg saint-Honore, parallel to the Champs Elysees  and next to the Prime Minister’s residence.

Some years ago, I heard the same word all day from a number of quarters in Paris. “NON.” But none more than at the Cercle de l’Union! They obviously did not like my Aussie accent. I shall tell you about that tomorrow. It was a stuffy establishment. And very formal. The menu for the men had prices. The women’s did not!

Today, I will try to recover from miles of walking in Paris. And too many carbs. Who can resist the pastries and bread in Paris? I could not!

 

 

It is sunny again. I am giving Summer a gold star for persistence. It is as if my diary, now on its 150th day, is dreaming the Aussie weather to me, like a a corroboree, from somewhere deep in the furnace of the Outback.

Two weeks ago, I started playing tennis on a Wednesday morning with a new group of pheasants, with a smattering of internationals, at the Hurlingham Club. I wanted to join the group, because of the stellar coach, Paul, who has been number one on the world seniors’ tour, many times.

To my astonishment, the pheasants, plus others, have taken me into their nye (flock of pheasants), like I am one of them. This was confirmed, when Anna invited me to join them for a Bridget Jones Baby Shower at her home in Richmond last night, before we trotted off to see the latest film at the local Odeon cinema.

I didn’t know what to expect. I was just grateful to be included.

It is ages since I’d been to Richmond, and I had forgotten how striking it is, perched on the banks of the Thames, on the border of Surrey. As I wound through the town centre and into the residential part, I was reminded of Bath, and Clifton in Bristol, and Paddington in Sydney: elegant and refined.

Anna is elegant; she is also refined, like her pretty terraced house, with its black wrought iron detail. But she also has a great deal of oomph – the X-factor. They all do.

They are not strictly the Barbour donning, welly wearing, labrador walking, braying speaking type of pheasant. I discovered that they all appear to share a love of foreign beauty – a number of them have homes scattered around the continent.

I knocked on the door. Do you remember the scene in the first Bridget Jones film where Bridget turns up to a country ‘tarts and vicars’ party; she is dressed like a Playboy Bunny, whilst everyone else has chickened out and turned up as per usual, apart from her Dad, who is a vicar? Anna opened the door as a Bunny, with a capital B. She was a knockout: a previous model and ballerina can wear pretty well anything and look fabulous. I was handed a white bunny key fob to stick somewhere on my body.

 

 

It was as if I had been transported, on a magic carpet, to the New Year’s  fireworks party in  Sydney – with tinsel like plumes erupting from the Sydney Harbour Bridge to the sky. Life was suddenly in technicolour.

The pace was fast and raucous for the next hour and a half. We played pin the Spanx on the Bridget sketch (rustled up artistically by Anna), sang karaoke to the soundtrack of the film and drank Cristal champagne, compliments of Erin, with stew and mash (perfect pheasant grub). Then we rushed down the hill to the cinema and took our seats and companionably laughed our heels off together.

 

Sometimes, when you least expect it, and you think nothing new will happen, life surprises you with a genie out of a bottle. Your wish is my command!

If a genie did magic out of a bottle, I would command, “Please take me forthwith to the beach at Austinmer, on the Illawarra coastline, south of Sydney, and plonk me hook line and sinker into the champagne froth of the surf, and then make the sun shine on my face and shoulders, and let my limbs feel the force of the swell, and let me taste the salt of the sea on my tongue, and let me hear the squawk of the seagulls overhead, and let all the people I love be there with me enjoying the beauty of my favourite place in the world. And I’d like to have a barbie at sunset. I am Australian!”

You can take the sheila out of Australia, but you can’t take Australia out of the sheila!

But last night, it was like a swim in the surf, refreshing and life affirming.

Today, I am going to Paris.

 

 

 

 

 

It is sunny today again. Summer is holding on by her fingertips. She is not one to give up.

Yesterday, I played tennis with a fun group of women at the Hurlingham Club. One of them has a job buying and customising Rolex watches in Mayfair. Her life is a far cry from mine! These days if I am at the Old Rectory, I am covered in dirt after hitting the garden or engaging in other practical pursuits.

Last weekend, the cricket club had the last match of the season. The one job the decorator didn’t have time to do when he recently came and repainted the windows, was to paint the floor of the pool house. It still had remnants of the previous owners on display, chewing gum stuck to floor, together with a ‘very attractive’ Domino’s pizza carton that had merged with it.

When Geoff and I set to work in the garden when we first moved in, and the builders moved out, we unearthed multiple balls (rugby, tennis and cricket); empty bottles of soft drinks, vodka and beer; a diving board that had obviously snapped off; crockery and cutlery; a rotting mattress up a tree; garden utensils; clothing and a few unmentionables. It was a purge. It was filthy work. But it had to be done. The garden had to be tamed.

So last weekend, I donned old clothes and sanded the floor to the pool house, relishing removing the debris that had melded with the floor. So satisfying! Then I set about giving it the first coat of paint, the undercoat. Just as I was struggling with the roller, a cricketer appeared to collect a ball hit over our boundary. He was amused to find me on my hands and knees and not reclining by the pool. He said that I had not set up the roller properly. He obliged and sorted it. Then he found the cricket ball and returned back to play. That is life in the country.

It is a far cry from the life that most women live if they are residents of the Royal Borough of Chelsea and Kensington. It was a far cry from the life I lived when I was a resident.

Tonight, I am going for dinner with my tennis friends and then to see Bridget Jones -the latest film after many years – based on the third book in the series. It will be a chance to get dressed up and drink some champers.

 

 

 

The grey blanket lifted this morning and left London, revealing a promising blue, sunny sky.

In Hampshire, we have the key to the Cricket Club’s  gate, which leads out to a walk along an old military railway line. There are houses in sight, although there are a few fields with sheep and cattle, along the way. It is semi-rural.

On the weekend Domino and I set out on our usual walk from the Old Rectory. All of a sudden, Domino bolted, like lightning, after a ‘bambi’ which was grazing on some vegetation nearby. What an unexpected, delightful surprise. I felt like Helen Mirren in the film The Queen, when she sees a majestic stag whilst she’s resting.

This is how celebrities must feel when they are hounded by the public.

When Hugo started at Sussex House, in Cadogan Square, near Sloane Square, you could feel the electricity crackling in the air when Nigella, a mother in Hugo’s class, was in the radius. People tried not to look at her, but they couldn’t help looking. She is extraordinarily beautiful and poised. She was, and still is, Britain’s most alluring food journalist/chef – sorry Mary Berry and Delia Smith – you’re a bit mumsy. It is the way Nigella licks the spoon and stares saucily at the camera. But she also comes across as your best mate.

Shortly after Geoff sat next to her at the introductory evening for new parents, there was a coffee morning for mothers; fathers were welcome, but none could be seen. There she was, Nigella, standing like an Italian goddess, amongst the mothers. Somehow I ended up standing next to her – accidentally, erm, on purpose – when the head of the fundraising committee made her pitch for help with the Christmas Fair.

Nigella locked her big, brown eyes on mine and complimented me on my nails. I had painted them chocolate brown, and they looked like mini Smeg fridges. She liked chocolate obviously. She was always licking it off the spoon on her cookery programmes.

I bemoaned the fact that Geoff hated any nail colour, other than pretty pink. She commiserated. Apparently, Charles Saatchi, her husband, had fixed views on appearance as well. Well, how matey was that.

Could Nigella become my next bestie – best friend. Obviously not, but it was a nice idea.

Last night, it was Book Club nearby to me in Fulham. Everybody was on fine form after the stellar summer we have had. It was like feeding time at the zoo – the din of chat was as loud as a bunch of cockatoos landing on your verandah. No-one discussed the book, much, which I had chosen: Tim Winton’s brilliant Aussie saga Cloudstreet. A few had persevered and finished it. I was grateful. As it captures that life in Oz is about survival, food, family and luck/faith. And the water, the sea and rivers.

Just up Nigella’s street. Apart from the water bit.

Today, I have a mega game of tennis, and then I am meeting up with an old friend to walk around the Serpentine in Hyde Park. I want to bottle the sunshine and store it in my larder. Nigella would approve, surely.

 

 

 

Yesterday was sunny in the morning, but a heavy, grey blanket descended in the afternoon. It is still tucked in, reluctant to move this morning.

I arrived from Hampshire, just in time for tennis at the Hurlingham Club, shortly after 10am. What a contrast to the same time last week when the temperature was over 30 degrees, and I was the colour of a beetroot most of the day.

Afterwards, a few of us headed off for a coffee in the cafeteria trying not to think about the drastic weather change. Another Aussie sheila, Christina, wandered in like a bouncy kangaroo; we briefly met at a charity event earlier in the year, but she knew my tennis companions, so she joined us for a chin wag.

What a breath of fresh air: hearing an Aussie accent, saying just what she was thinking, no bones about it. She had a hint of the larrikin about her: playfully rebellious.

She was as pretty as a rosella and as animated as a cockatoo. The grey day that I walked back out into, didn’t seem so oppressive. I’ve had conversations with three Aussie sheilas in a week, and it has been a tonic to autumn nipping at my heels.

 

On the car journey up the A3 this morning from the Old Rectory, there was a fascinating programme on BBC 4, about how the mind performs during periods of rest, when it’s idling like an engine at traffic lights, and when it is not concentrating on a specific task.

Apparently, your brain never stops working and, contrary to previous scientific thought, during ‘mind wandering’, a new word for ‘daydreaming’, the brain is actually more active than when, for example, you are concentrating on a task at work. It is impossible, apparently, to think about nothing and flatline. Instead, the memory part of your brain squirrels off in different directions, analysing relationships, planning the future and creating. It either constructs or deconstructs.

Is that why Dostoevsky wrote such powerful novels after being imprisoned at the age of twenty-seven? Did doing nothing allow his mind to construct a world view that later pervaded his great writing? Or did Mandela’s incarceration for twenty seven years on Robben Island enable him to perfect his ideas on how to deconstruct apartheid? Geoff always says that children should be allowed to be bored, so that their imaginations can come to the fore.

When I was a child floating under water for hours upon hours in the tomb-like silence, I would make up stories, where I was the heroine, of course. I would fall in love, become rich and famous, become a princess, marry a prince, sing like Olivia Newton-John, become a great lawyer and win court cases like Perry Mason or Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, bump into David Cassidy on the beach, and after he fell in love with me, almost instantly, he would whisk me back to America where I would join the cast of the Patridge Family, or write a great novel like Gone with the Wind. These daydreamings of mine, constituted paracosms, detailed imaginary worlds where one scenario led to another scenario chronologically. They weren’t fleeting ideas.

Thank God for my diary, so that I can remember the past and construct a tapestry for me, more than anyone else.

The weather is now decidedly autumnal. Today, I will start putting the garden to bed for the winter. It is well past its prime. I know the feeling!

The meadow has been mowed, the wild flowers are dead, so I have access to more of the borders. Before I had to wade through the long, jungle-like grass to find the back of them, so that I could gouge out the weeds.

The weeds are not as prolific now that autumn is on our doorstep; they have given up multiplying like rabbits. Like the rest of the garden, they are tired after the heatwave, and they have lost their energy.

On Friday, my former Aussie flatmate, Jennifer Atkins, came to visit me at the Old Rectory, with her friend Meredith Brodie. They were models together in the eighties.They modelled with Elle Macpherson – The Body – at the Sydney Opera House for the Bicentennial Fashion Show – 1988.

I was Jen’s lodger just before I departed for my non-return trip to London in 1988. She owned a flat in Sans Souci, a bayside suburb between Botany Bay and Cronulla, the farthest southern Sydney beach. She was dating her now husband, Glen, who was at the College of Law with me in 1986. It was a six month course after Uni, during which time you pretended to be a lawyer; you had mock cases that you worked on. It was the equivalent to the British articles system, where a law graduate is apprenticed to a law firm and shadows practitioners in different departments.

Jen had just come from Amsterdam. She and Glen have a spectacularly talented sixteen year old ballerina for a daughter, Lania. She recently won what is deemed to be the biggest ballet competition in the Southern Hemisphere, the Eisteddfod Ballet Scholarship 2016, also at the Sydney Opera House. She is the ‘number one’ young ballerina in Australia! With the $18,000 winnings, she is pursuing her studies at the Dutch National Ballet Academy for two years.

Over lunch, I joked that Hugo, my son, should link up with Lania – think of the gene pool. Meredith joked that her son, Tom, was also an athlete, and had been earmarked! I thought to myself, “Yeah right , who could be better than Hugo!” His artistic talents came to mind. And he was pretty good at tennis too.

Later, it transpired that Meredith’s son was the renowned young polo player, Tom Brodie. In fact, unbeknownst to me, I watched him play this summer for Zacara, in the semi finals, for the Cowdray Park Jaeger-LeCoultre Gold Cup. Meredith was there too, obviously; what proud mother would miss that moment.

It was like the card game of Snap. First card, beautiful ballerina at top of her game, second card, handsome polo player at the top of his game. Snap – winner combination. Hugo, love him, but…

How extraordinary that two models, close friends, should produce two top cards; how thrilling to share that joy.

I asked Jen how she felt the moment that Lania won. She said it was indescribably amazing.

I had to get Domino to the vet to have his nails cut, so our goodbye was rushed in the driveway. I gave them both a hug. My head rested on their chests. They are Amazonian.

I can hear the soldiers’ machine gun fire over at Longmoor, the army training centre nearby. Oh, a pang of sadness pricks my heart. With more terrorist attacks over the weekend in New York, I pray that they will be safe if they see action soon.