Today, it is colder, and autumn has properly pushed summer off the map.

I have a concert and tea for older people later today, at St Paul’s, Onslow Square. We are expecting close to four hundred guests. The event is free and volunteer led. It is an impressive achievement.

Yesterday, I mentioned a disturbing dream about a tsunami, the underlying theme pointing to my desire to protect the children, when they were young, from all harm; parents obviously can’t, as they cannot eliminate random risks. I still have the same instincts. Nothing has changed, but they are no longer in my care 24/7.

Inevitably there were accidents and mishaps that happened to them growing up, despite my overly protective instincts. Anna has a scar on her forehead, and Hugo has one on his lip to prove the point.

Anna was, always, easily spooked when she was young. She watched White Fang, with a young Ethan Hawke. Mild fare, but in one scene there was a dead body under a frozen river. The sight of this motionless old man’s face, triggered a bout of nightmares for Anna – ending up as a nightmare for Geoff and me. We were up and down to her bedroom, in the wee, dark, still hours for about six weeks.

On another occasion, we were staying in Scotland at a houseparty – a fully fledged pheasant and stag event. There was tartan and velvet, at dinner, as far as the eye could see – miles of it.

While we were having a jolly good time at dinner, the children were being entertained elsewhere. Mine were five and three years at the time. The group watched Rowan Atkinson’s hilarious, but cringeworthy, movie, Bean Movie, in which he stains and tries to clean Whistler’s Mother’s face. The scene should be called Face Off. 

First, he sneezes all over her face, then he uses a handkerchief to clean off the snot – disastrously the handkerchief has blue ink on it from a leaking pen in his pocket, then he tries to remove the ink with chemicals; initially, he is successful, but then the chemicals completely obliterate her face so there is only the canvas left.

Somehow the disappearance of the mother’s face traumatised Anna. She couldn’t sleep for weeks. She woke us up, repeatedly, every night. I think she wanted to check our faces were still in place.

I had a good look at the painting at the Musee d’Orsay, while I was in Paris, a couple of weekends ago. The mother is in profile, and her expression is vacant. Did she suffer from dementia? Some of the older people at our concert do! It is heartbreaking.