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.

Summer has gone on vacation; banished. All through the night, rain, wind, thunder and lightning jolted me awake from a restless sleep. It wasn’t a fleeting storm; it was as if Zeus, the Greek god of the skies and intense darkness, was back in action, playing bowls all night with the clouds. He raged from dusk ’til dawn. It was much darker at dawn. I thought it was the middle of the night when I awoke, but when I found my watch it was going on 6am. Winter is whispering, “I am a coming.”

Yesterday, the committee for Older People’s Teas and Concerts came for lunch. It was so hot in our little house in Fulham. I could see the women glowing with a sheen of perspiration. It is hard to make decisions about the logistics of hot tea and cakes, when your mind is thinking about stripping off and sitting in a bucket of water; well at least mine was.

As soon as they left, I bolted for the car and its air conditioning. I then made my way down to the Old Rectory in Hampshire. It was so much cooler when I arrived. Domino and I collapsed on a lounger in the shade.

I looked up at the clear blue sky, listened to the birds and promptly fell asleep with him beside me. The heat had sapped my energy. And playing tennis this week in it.

I later headed up to bed at 9pm. Wiped.

As a child in Oz, I don’t remember the heat slowing me down in summer. I have a vivid memory of riding my bike up to the corner shop to buy lollies – sweets – when I was about eight, and in front of me a mirage appeared; the intense heat transformed the tar road into a lake. Being hot to bursting was normal for an Aussie kid in summer. You still ran around the playground at school, or in the backyard, like a tornado. If you didn’t have a pool to swim in, you ran through the sprinkler in the garden.

This is in stark contrast to my children’s experience, on the whole, during a British summer when they were growing up. It was occasionally very warm, but it was a rarity.

Yesterday, I mentioned that when we attended our first parents’ meeting at Hugo’s prep school, Sussex House, Geoff found himself sitting next to Nigella Lawson. She looked as if her skin had never, unlike mine, been fried in the sun. It was flawless. She didn’t have a freckle in sight. And she was spectacularly beautiful. Not only was she unblemished, she appeared as cool as a cucumber. Serene, just like the Mona Lisa. She has an Italian heritage.

Today, an old flat mate from Oz, Jen Atkins, is coming to visit me at the Old Rectory. It is about twenty years since I last saw her.

 

 

 

 

Today is rumoured to be the last hot day of this summer. Looking out of the window of our Fulham house, it is incredible to believe that, very soon, grey clouds will appear again. It has been a long stretch of perfect weather, with pristine blue skies, day after day.

Yesterday, we had dinner with five other couples in a beautifully stylish house on Napier Avenue, just around the corner from the Hurlingham Club. I caught my breath as we were led through the elegant drawing room to the garden, revealed through a backless house, as the enormous glass doors had been concertinaed away to the sides. The impact was palpable and impressive.

Terracotta pots were dotted amongst the symmetrical olive trees at the far end. An Italian garden in London. All perfectly uplit. We had lovely wine and nibbles in the fresh, balmy air. So spoiling. And finally, we took our seats in the formal dining room. I glanced up behind the hostess. Some deceased pheasants and stags, immortalised in oil, stared down at us from their heavy gilt frames. The woman was not a looker. I was unsurprised to hear that she had never been married. The hostess, however, is elegant and striking. The gene pool has evolved favourably.

I was on best behaviour. I had to stuff the kangaroo in me deep down, like a joey hidden in a pouch, hoping that my head wouldn’t pop out at the wrong time.

There were rows and rows of cutlery. And I had a blank; did I talk to the gent on my left to begin with during the starter or to the right first? I was momentarily flustered, and stared hard at the hostess. She was talking to the bloke on the left. So likewise, I chattered away to the gent on the left, like a kookaburra, asking questions about his life and family.

Next I spoke to a Scot, Angus, to my right. He owned a large house in Aberdeen, which was once a seminary to train boys and youths for the priesthood. The chapel has been converted into the kitchen. Later the seminary moved to Blairs College, now closed. He described the house as symmetrical, with rows of windows and a door smack in the middle. It sounded reminiscent of large Scandinavian homes. I wondered if it was like the house in Larson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. A disturbing, but brilliant, film in both Swedish and English.

Before dinner, I had to do something about my hair. It had been wrecked by too much swimming and sun, in the last five weeks, since the stellar weather arrived. I had it cut by Sabrina at Richard Ward, who did the bridesmaids’ hair for the Royal Wedding of Will and Kate. I always love hearing about the day, over and over again, like reading a favourite book repeatedly. I was on my way through the salon, when I spied the Countess of Wessex, married to the Queen’s youngest son, Edward, having her hair done by Cristiano, the flamboyant Italian stylist who has been there forever. She is so pretty in real life, with striking blue eyes. And she is very normal. She was in the common parts with everyone else.

It is always a shock to see someone you expect to see from a great distance, through television or the press, up close and personal. It was like the time we went to the first parents’ evening at Hugo’s prep school, Sussex House, and Geoff sat next to, unwittingly,  Nigella. He looked smugly happy when he clocked her after a while. I will tell you about that tomorrow.

Now, I have to prepare for the Older People’s Tea and Concert committee lunch at my house. I can barely stand to turn the oven on in this  heat.

And later today, I will head back the Old Rectory.

 

 

Today is the second last day of summer, according to the weather forecast. It will be sweltering and sweaty again. Yesterday was the hottest September day on record for over one hundred years. It topped 30 degrees.

After gradually transforming into a beetroot during the course of tennis yesterday at Hurlingham, I headed to the outdoor pool to cool off with some of my Book Club friends. We had a BBQ and relished the last drops of summer 2016. We idled away the day, knowing that in a few weeks we will be wearing jumpers and trousers. The pool was packed with other punters, squeezed together like sardines. Everyone was in high spirits.

In the summer of 2005, when Anna was on Family Affairs, the soap, she had to be chaperoned while filming. Geoff took the first tranche of chaperoning, instead of going with Hugo and me to Paphos, in Cyprus. He had a staycation with Anna in London, while we headed off to the sun. Anna wasn’t required every second of the day, so they spent time at the Hurlingham when she was not at the studio.

Meanwhile, I arrived at the Annabelle Hotel, perched on the end of Paphos town. After checking in, Hugo and I headed to the supermarket to stock up on snacks and drinks. I went to pay with my debit card. It was declined. Which was very odd, as there was a wadge of money in my account specifically for the holiday. I was perplexed. I rang the bank. My account had been drained. I was the victim of a fraud. The bank had to cancel my card, my only card. Hence no way of paying for things.

I went to the front desk of the hotel and explained that I had a problem with my card, that someone had stolen all my money. They were very unhappy that I did not have a valid credit card to cover expenses. They looked at me suspiciously. Why had I turned up without my husband? I put two and two together. They thought that I had split up with Geoff. And had no money or means of paying. They insisted that Geoff wire some money. I was treated like a second class citizen.

Just like the weather yesterday, it was baking hot in Paphos in August. All you could do was swim and relax. And that is what Hugo and I did, every day for ten days. It was awkward with the staff. Was I just imagining it, or were the staff really looking at me with pity? I felt self conscious. It gave me a taste of what it feels like to be a single parent.

There was a beach nearby, where we headed when we were bored of the hotel. When the wind was up, there was good surf. I was incredulous that a lot of the children didn’t know how to dive under the waves to avoid being ‘dumped’. I ended up teaching them to dive to the bottom of the sea bed when the turbulence was heading their way. Even with a language barrier, I managed to instruct some Russian children, using a graphic demonstration, how to avoid being pulverised. They were grateful for the tuition.

For Hugo, the highlight was the buffet dinner at the end of the day. It was a different nationality every night. And there was a bar in the pool, where he could swim up, sit on a stool, waist high in water, and order ice creams.

I felt sad though, as it was meant to be our first family beach holiday in the Mediterranean. And I was on my tod, with a hyperactive eight year old, who needed a lot of entertaining. Some of the other fathers and sons included him in pool games, but as a lone parent, there were no overtures to chat to me. Not without a partner. I spent my time reading, and I managed to read War and Peace cover to cover.

Today, I am off the Richard Ward, my hairdressers for over fifteen years. I was their client possibly before Kate Middleton. Tonight, we are having dinner with Hurlingham friends, who live on the stunning street that leads to the entrance of the club, Napier Avenue. Sure to be some cracker pheasants and stags at dinner.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I am melting like ice cream. It is so hot today. It as if all my wishes have come true, but at the same time, it is so hot, I cannot think. I am muddled, befuddled. 28 degrees in September! Am I dreaming Australia to London through my diary? Where is the corroboree?  Is someone chucking a boomerang just for me in Oz, so that the hot weather lands over here on my patch?

But looking back at Anna’s days on Family Affairs, Channel 5’s soap, she could think, and she could think very fast. She could look at her script and learn it in seconds. While others were rehearsing for a considerable time, she read it a few times, and bingo, it was in her brain.

Of course, I was oblivious to the story line, until it was aired in the months ahead, after filming.

She stole money; she encouraged her friend Chloe to drink vodka whilst truanting from school; she was a ‘vamp’ at Halloween, she boasted about her portable DVD player (now so passé); she lost a little boy she was looking after; she said she was only able to eat salad as she was on a no carbs diet (prophetic about our wheat adverse era) and she objected to taking the bus!

Not the easiest story line to digest. But hey, she was on telly. And for an eleven year old with no experience at all!!!, she was convincing. The vicar’s wife, kindly, concluded that her character was a deterrent to bad behaviour. It was a help to others! She was stretching it, but it helped me cope with the flaws in Anna’s pretend character.

Anna’s mother in the show was actor Glynis Barber, from the crime show Dempsey and Makepeace, circa 1985-1986, three seasons. She starred in it with her real life husband, Michael Brandon. They are still knocking around in the world of telly.

Her best friend’s Dad in the show was Gary Costello, played by Gary Webster. He was in Minder with George Cole.

Good actors, but not great actors. Still they were earning a good living doing their craft.

I am so hot today, but that summer in England, the year of Anna’s  television debut, was decidedly tepid. So lukewarm, you could hardly get up a sweat.

Today, I played three hours of tennis in scorching hot weather. I was puce like a beetroot. Dad would have said, “Strewth love, you need to sit in the fridge.” I played my last game against a Texan. She was as cool as a cucumber. She forgot that I was an Aussie and said, “I am cool, because I am a Texan.” I said, “But you are forgetting; I am an Aussie.” She said, “But you’ve been here a long time.”

Oh no, am I becoming a pheasant???

 

 

Friday was lovely again. Summer is gripping on, like a child trying to hold onto monkey bars.

I went to see Nicky Barber near Winchester for lunch on Friday. As Anna’s godmother, she has loyally followed her progress, from birth to baby steps, through childhood to teens and on to adulthood. She was eager for her latest news.

Nicky devotedly watched Anna act on Family Affairs, the Channel 5 soap opera, running from 1997 to Christmas 2005. Selfless of her really, considering that soaps are not, exactly, her cup of tea.

Family Affairs was meant to rival Eastenders, but it never hit the big time. It ran Monday to Friday, each week night, for thirty minutes. It was not, shall I say, highbrow viewing.

Soap operas are not, as far as I am aware, the usual fodder for Sloanes – both pheasants and stags. Except these days, the youngsters are glued to Made in Chelsea. And Downton Abbey is an upper class soap, in a sense.

After Anna was signed by Sylvia Young Agency in the summer of 2005, they sent her for her first audition to play Chelsea Heath on Family Affairs, which was filmed in Thames Studios in Wimbledon. So off we trotted, mother and daughter, parked the car and went into the studio. It was buzzy. Loads of mothers and daughters were there. Some fathers too.

The audition process was just as it is portrayed fictionally. A frazzled woman came out with a clipboard, which she was scouring with a furrowed brow. “Anna Wilmot. You’re next. Follow me.” You could tell she’d done it a thousand times before. I wished her luck, not thinking in a billion years that she would get the gig.

The next day, we received a call from her agent. Anna had landed the job. You could have knocked me over with a feather.

One small glitch. We were all due to go on a family summer holiday to Cyprus. I would be heading there with Hugo and leaving Geoff and Anna to start her soap career. We had been living in our new Chelsea house for just over six months. And now my daughter would be playing a spoilt rich kid named Chelsea. Irony or what!

Today, I am sanding and painting the inside of the garden outhouse. I want to get it done before the winter damp comes. And it is on its way.