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.