It is sunny again. But it is going to deteriorate. The ups and downs of the weather. Does it mirror our moods?

Yesterday, I was in London. It was hot and muggy. We ended up having a BBQ dinner at the Hurlingham Club with mates on the terrace, savouring the last dregs of the summer’s light and warmth.

Domino didn’t care that it was hot yesterday. He is learning to chase the dogs in the local park. He runs up to them, enticing them to chase after him with a little jig around them, and then he takes off at a rate of knots as fast as his four legs can take him. He knows that he is the fastest one in the vicinity. The little dogs try to catch him for a bit, and then they give up and go back to their carers. Domino does the victory lap. He is saying that he is the top dog.

What a lovely thought, to be able to run your socks off and outdo others.

In this prolonged summer we are lucky enough to be having. I miss the water – the sea. I miss the smell of salt. I miss the feeling of salt water around my limbs, sea water invigorating me. I miss Australia. In my childhood memories of Oz, it is the sea, rather than rivers, I think of. That I dream of, awake and asleep, in my landlocked life in England.

Very occasionally, however, I went to stay as a youngster near a river and went swimming. The river felt dead to me. It felt stagnant. Obviously, below the surface, fish and crustaceans, eked their living. Finding sustenance. Living a life. But without the effervescence of the surf – waves making champagne-like froth, it felt tomb like under the surface. Deathly still like a predator. I knew further down, there may be eels in the reeds. It felt a little bit icky. But if you were boiling hot, who cared. You had to cool down in whatever water you could find.

I remember being away with some mates, on a river bank, camping as a teenager. There was a long jetty protruding out into the green, still river water. We did what Aussies call ‘chucking bombies’. That means running as fast as your legs can take you along a wooden dock, and then leaping into the air and landing with the biggest splash you can muster into the river.

I remember picking up speed on this particular hot summer’s day on the river and running with all my strength and might along the jetty. I wanted to impress my friends with the biggest bombie imaginable. I felt on top of the world.

Big problem, my foot went for the next wooden plank to take my weight, and it was ‘bloody well’ missing. I fell through like a dead weight into the water below, and in the process, I bruised my thigh black and blue. Thankfully, I did not decapitate myself, break bones, crack a skull. I got off lightly. But I had the biggest, bluest bruise from knee to derriere – bum- you can imagine. It looked like thunderclouds about to spit out lightning.

That was the feeling I often had when we first moved to Chelsea. As if I had jumped off a jetty, and instead of landing neatly in the water, I kept on falling through cracks, ending up a bit bruised and bewildered. That was because I was suddenly the tiniest fish swimming in a very large pond. And it made me feel out of my depth.

One day as I was waiting outside Limerston Street for my builder, my new neighbour, Caroline Stanbury, pulled up to meet her builder. We were both doing up our houses at the same time. I had never seen a more glamorous woman in my life. I was covered in dust from head to toe. She looked like she had just stepped off the catwalk.

Today, I am savouring what I know to be the last dregs of summer.