It is raining today. Summer is slipping away, like ice cream melting in the sun.

Yesterday, I managed to sit with Anna by the pool at Hurlingham for a few minutes. I was walking home, and I saw her approaching the pool entrance from a different direction. I observed her without her noticing me. Here she was – my tall, lovely daughter – now a woman. When did she get to be so big? Since we had dovetailed – serendipity – I asked if we could sit for a few minutes in the sun and catch up. She was on a lunch break. So we grabbed a few rays. I had to leave promptly, as I was having lunch in Chelsea with my Spanish friend, code name Flamenco.

The staff love Anna at the Hurlingham Club, because she chats to them like a kookaburra. Chip off the old block. I was like her at her age.

Once, after Geoff and I had been away, I went to the Polo Bar and ordered some drinks on my club card; like a club credit card that you pay off monthly. The Maitre d’ asked if I had a tall blonde daughter. I said that I did. He chuckled and told me that she had been ordering food everyday on my card while we had been abroad. I raised my eyebrows. As he handed me the drinks he said, “In fact, she told me yesterday that she had to get home and tidy the house as the place was a tip!”

The next day I asked Anna if she would like to join me for lunch at the Hurlingham. She said that she would love to. I led her to the bar. She knew that the gig was up as soon as I led her to the Maitre d’. I asked him, “Is this the young woman who has been eating at my expense?” We all burst out laughing.

Yesterday at the pool, we went and ordered some coffee at the cafe, and the Aussie sales person – a sheila – chatted away to Anna as if they were best buddies. They knew a lot about each other – little details. Anna gives people time. She always has time to talk. She looks at them in the eye and not over their shoulder.

When we started building works on Limerston Street in 2004, I tried to chat to people in nearby cafes and shops in Chelsea. Not a good idea sometimes. In big cities, people can feel distrustful, question motives, if you are too friendly. They’re wary. Rightly so!

However, our new neighbours, Cem Habib and Caroline Stanbury, were incredibly friendly. When we all downed tools, or our builders did in autumn of 2004, and finally moved in, we would chat over the back fence, the small boundary that separated our small back gardens. I was delighted that they loved to BBQ. We had more in common than I thought. She may have looked like she’d stepped out of the pages of VOGUE, but she loved a juicy steak.

Their BBQ guests often included celebrities like Diane Kruger and Lisa Bilton (first Bridget Jones’ Diary film). They would sit around the garden table on balmy summer’s nights and wrap their laughing gear -their mouths- around food cooked on the Weber by Cem, an avid BBQ chef. Stan the Man, my father, would have smiled with approval.

Today, I am off to see Nicky Barber, my farmer friend, near Winchester. Always a tonic.

 

 

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.

 

 

It is hot today. We are back to summer.

Yesterday, I caught the tube to the Tate Modern. The approach is stunning. As you walk over the Millennium Bridge spanning the Thames, you have St Paul’s Cathedral behind you, The Shard to the left, and Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and the Tate Modern in front of you. There was a floating box on the Thames with a small Asian man on top.

Tate Modern is, principally, a venue for modern art. It has opened a new tower, the Switch House, so it has increased by sixty percent. It was a power station in a former life. It is young: sixteen years.

I have to admit, I don’t like the place. It is minimalist, of course, but it is windowless in places, and I felt claustrophobic. I was lost at one point. I overheard another visitor say that he couldn’t figure out how to get around. I assented silently.

The Georgia O’Keefe exhibition was interesting. Her stunning flowers are reputed to be erotic, based on part of the female anatomy. But if you paint or draw a flower accurately, there will be reproductive parts! I preferred her paintings from the time she lived in New Mexico. The red earth reminded me of the red earth of Australia, especially the interior desert near Ayers Rock – Uluru.

O’Keefe called this desert world, the Faraway, as it was so removed from the East Coast where she lived for the rest of the time. Again, there are parallels with the Outback in Oz; instead of Faraway, it is called The Never-Never. It is the ‘back of beyond’. Remote and infertile.

A comment she made resonated deeply with me. She stated, “I wish you could see the place here – there is something so perfect about the mountains and the lake and the trees – sometimes I want to tear it all to pieces – it seems so perfect.” I have, on occasion, have had the same feeling when confronted with beauty. I want to destroy it. I feel pain instead of joy. What is that?

Is it that one feels inadequate in the face of such blinding perfection? Is that why people deface beautiful buildings with graffiti?

When we rented in Elystan Street near Brompton Cross, South Kensington, in 2004, we didn’t have any outside space.  There was a drive that ran in front of the house to a small office building at the rear of the property, housing a property  business. Hugo and Anna would sometimes throw a ball out there, but it wasn’t easy as a chaffeur often wanted to park there, waiting for his boss.

I often saw the boss pass by the window. He was very dignified and handsome. He would smile and say hello if we bumped into each other. Occasionally, his daughters would hang around. They were all beautiful, but the youngest was perfection. I was not surprised that she turned out, in later life, to be a supermodel: Cara Delevingne.

Today, I will try to keep calm and cool and carry on!

 

 

I

It is hot and humid today in London. I have just driven to Fulham from the Old Rectory. The autumn tennis season is about to ‘rev up’ at the Hurlingham Club, so I will be bouncing around like a kangaroo amongst the pheasants again.

The traffic, now that school is back, was back to its full capacity. It was gridlock coming down Putney High Street at 9am this morning.

Yesterday, I tried to garden, tried to do admin, tried to sort out clothes from summer to autumn, tried to sort life. Instead, I ended up doing nothing very convincingly. A wasted day, it felt. Even Domino sensed that I was in a pickle. I had the Sunday night feeling. I was skittish. Like a horse that wants to bolt.

At the beginning of 2004, I had to concentrate all my efforts on finding a house to buy in Chelsea. We were climbing the walls in our little rental house. Finally, I found a house on the Ten Acre Estate that I set my heart on, near World’s End, and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. We had been outbid on a few houses by the time I saw it. I knew what I was looking for by now. I had honed my buying skills.

It was on Limerston Street, a cut through from Fulham Road to Kings Road, but it was perfect for us. It had two cinemas close by; my idea of heaven. Three bedrooms, but you could squeeze out an extra study on the top floor, and make a small sitting room in the basement with a view of the courtyard garden. It also looked down a treelined street and onto pretty gardens at the rear, so it was light and private.

I had done a few piecemeal projects in Elms Crescent, Clapham, but this house needed a full gutting. Rewiring, re-plumbing, waterproofing, decorating, new kitchen and bathrooms. Would my skills be up to it?

The elderly owners, an ex-Ambassador and his wife, had lived there for thirty years or more. It had damp in the basement kitchen, which like all houses in Chelsea, was half below street level. It had the typical black, wrought-iron staircase to an entrance at basement level, probably for coal to be delivered in bygone times, and then there was a staircase up to the front door, with ornate black railings on either side. The next floor up was originally used as the drawing room, as it had pretty balconies. Now it was the practise to make it a master bedroom and have your living area on the elevated ground floor.

The Ambassador took a shine to Geoff. We offered asking price. We always do if the price is right. No use in haggling and being outbid, in my opinion. It was accepted. The problem was, in this housing climate, sellers would accept a price verbally, and then use it to leverage up another interested party to an even higher price. It isn’t until contracts are exchanged after searches etc in the UK, that parties are legally bound to the sale.

The Ambassador told Geoff that he would not sell the property to anyone other than us. Music to our ears.

Matters were progressing swimmingly, until, of course, there was a glitch. The sellers could not find the correct paperwork for some building work they had undergone, many moons ago. Should we proceed?

It was nerve wracking, but we sorted it out while we were in Bruges for my 42nd birthday. We had to juggle calls with our solicitor with sightseeing, but finally, suddenly, everything dovetailed, and we were able to exchange contracts.

Bruges was fascinating. It was like being in a sinister film set. Very gothic, eerie and dark. We tried to hire bicycles to ride around the perimeter of the town, but they were all taken. The only bicycles that were available were for disabled children. The adult cycled while the child was belted into a chair in front.

The children were up for it, providing that we supplied hot chocolate after. I didn’t really think anything of it, until we saw people stop to stare at these two blonde children whizzing by. They either looked in admiration, as if to say “Good for you!”, or they looked in pity, as if to say, “How tragic!” It is strange how a sight can evoke two extreme reactions – either hope or pity.

Anyway, when we returned to London on the Eurotunnel from Brussels, we were a step closer to begin settled in Chelsea. We were owners of a new house. Now the work had to begin. I had to find builders.

Later, I am going to the Tate Modern to see the Georgia O’Keefe exhibition.

 

 

 

The weather is rather bleak today. There is fine mist laying low on the ground, and a steady, light rain is falling on the garden.

When we went home for the Christmas of 2003, after our move to Chelsea a few months earlier, it was a splash of colour, transposed onto a muted winter landscape in London.

One minute I was wrapped in an overcoat trying to keep warm in London, and the next day, almost, I was on the beach hitting the surf in my cozzies. There had, of course, been, in the interim, a long haul flight taking twenty four hours.

And there was another addition to the family to meet: Sophia, my brother and sister-in -law’s new beautiful daughter. New life, at Christmas, at a time of great change for the Wilmot family. It was a joyous time.

But, we still had not found a house to buy in Chelsea. I felt like a nomad. It was an unsettling time for us all.

It was hard coming back, in January, to our tiny rental and to more British winter, after the colour of Oz! It was as if we had regressed to black and white cinema again. The shops had their post New Year sales on, and their windows had replaced cosy nativity scenes with basement bargains. The Christmas lights and baubles, and the festivities, had given way to gloom.

It would be a few months to spring. You just have to get on with it in the first quarter of the year in Britain. It’s like the play Waiting for Godot, where nothing ever changes, day after day. In Beckett’s play, Godot never turns up. But spring does in Britain, like magic.

No matter what the weather, during this first glum quarter from January to March, I had to get out and go for a walk in the morning. Otherwise I’d go loopy.

My favourite place to walk when we moved to Chelsea was Hyde Park, with Kensington Palace, the Italian Fountains and the Serpentine lake. And coffee shops dotted around the place to duck into for a hot chocolate.

Heavy snow fell in the January after we returned from Christmas in Oz, and the park looked like Narnia in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. In the book, the witch turns her subjects into statues with her wand if she’s fed up with them. Even the Peter Pan statue in the park was encrusted with snow. The horseman, astride his mount, was also covered in snow.

As I approached the Lido, where swimmers, braving duck pooh, swim lengths in the man-made lake during the summer months, I was just thinking how cold I was. I wrapped my coat, even tighter, around my frame as I approached the swimming zone.

I could not believe my eyes. There was a woman who had just jumped through the ice covered lake in a black swim suit. I had to blink to check I was not hallucinating.

I made my way quickly to speak to her. I was so impressed. I asked if I could take her photo so that I would never forget the moment.

 

There is a group known as the ‘Icebergs’ who swim in Bondi sea pool 365 days a year. But they never face ice. It is flipping cold in winter in Sydney, but still. My mother, Beverley, also knows some older bravehearts , Kevin and Babs Eastman, who face the sea water every day in Bulli pool, near where she lives. These people are known as ‘troopers’. Made of ‘tough stuff’. They’re great Aussies.

It is promising to cheer up later in the week. Snow and ice are still a long way off.

 

 

This morning, when I arrived back at the Old Rectory, early, I found dead leaves from the beech tree on the drive. In London, which is ahead of the game in its trajectory to autumn, all the plane trees were shedding.

Schools will be back next week. London will be crazy with traffic, both on the roads and otherwise. The footprint will increase exponentially. The tourists will have departed.

Yesterday, I had lunch with Anne at the Bluebird cafe in the sunshine. She is my first friend from Kingsgrove Infants and Primary School, in Sydney, which we attended many moons ago. Too many moons ago to think about!

Her girls were itching to get back to school in London. The holidays are too prolonged, in Britain, over the summer, in my humble opinion. Historically, it was so that the pupils could help bring the harvest in. Now they just start to climb the walls if there isn’t enough to do.

Yesterday, we also went to see The Deep Blue Sea at Curzon Cinema Chelsea. It was a live streamed performance from the National Theatre to 650 cinemas around the UK. It was harrowing. It began with an attempted suicide, and it ended with only a glimmer of hope.

In the short interval, we had a speed dinner. We were with friends from Hurlingham, and we had all brought something to add to the picnic. Salmon and new potatoes, followed by strawberries, meringues and cheese. And wine! I needed the sustenance given the intensity of the performance.

In Anna’s first term at Queen’s Gate school, in 2003, in the lead up to Christmas, she managed to land the part of Nancy in Oliver Twist. She sang As Long as He Needs Me with convincing pathos, despair and hope. I could see people dabbing their eyes as she drew to a close, wrapping her shawl tightly around her for comfort.

The bottom line, let’s not forget, was that Nancy was willing to hang in there with Bill, even though he was a criminal and beat her up from time to time. At the end of the play, off stage, but with shadows cast onto a screen so that we could glimpse the nail biting action, Bill snuffed her out like a candle in the wind. There was thunderous applause.

Mrs Schollenberger was sitting beside me. She encouraged me to enrol Anna at the Sylvia Young Theatre School in Marylebone, North of Oxford Street. Some young hopefuls attend the theatre school full time, juggling academic studies with music and theatre tuition, and if they are lucky, performing in actual productions. Anna enrolled for Saturday mornings.

This meant we had to be up bright and early to trek up to the school, through Hyde Park and onwards north. I didn’t mind, nor did Geoff, as the school was located near Regent’s Park. I would go and have breakfast and read the paper, stroll through the rose garden and think, while Anna sang her heart out.

Many years ago, we went to the Open Air Theatre in the park and watched one of my brother-in-law’s former pupils, then aged nineteen, in a production of Romeo and Juliet. The ex-Harrow student, was Benedict Cumberbatch. He’s come a long way since then. Even then, you could see his star quality.

Before long, Anna insisted on auditioning with the agency attached to the school, as she wanted to try for parts. I thought that it was a long shot, but they took her on.

Today, it is raining. I am almost glad as it means that I won’t have to drag the hose around the garden.

 

The weather is milder. The heat is being turned down, like a radiator switching off at the end of the day.

Yesterday, I was back in Fulham, in our little house near the Hurlingham Club. The children are both in residence, so it is nice to touch base.

I went to Parsons Green for lunch at Cote Brasserie with The Hon., which signifies that her father was titled. She is charming, clever and funny, so it was fun to catch up with her summer news. She had been to Scotland for large chunks of it, and she was telling me how, with the glorious weather lately, her party were able to picnic in the great outdoors. The Queen, apparently, when she is at Balmoral, adores to get Philip barbequing, and they eat with plastic utensils. Hard to believe, I know. Surely the butler brings the polished silver.

Last weekend, Anna had three of her St Catharine’s College friends, from Cambridge days, to stay at the Old Rectory. On Saturday, the weather was glorious, and they frolicked around like little lambs in the sunshine, enthusiastically moving from one activity to the other and eating outdoors.

On Sunday, however, the weather imploded, and they were forced to walk in the rain. They had been handed out ‘rain covers’ at the underground, covered in McDonald’s Big Macs.

I love Big Macs, and if I am the mood, I will order one at the drive through at Wandsworth Bridge roundabout, just like I did in Sydney. It reminds me of the diner in Happy Days, a hit TV series exported from America when I was twelve. Portraying perfect people, living the American dream. And hamburgers and shakes were a big part of that dream. I now realise that it was the foreshadowing of product placement marketing in screen productions. Think of all those Starbucks takeaway coffees we see in films.

Off the four of them went, like troopers, to walk in the rain, clad in hamburgers. They still managed to look stylish. The advantage of youth. As a foursome, they represent major aspects of Great Britain: one is Scottish with reddish hair, one is Irish with dark hair, one is from Yorkshire with blonde hair and Anna, well she is a mixed blend of Aussie and English.

When the Brexit vote was looming, I drove through Nyewood on the way to the South Downs. It has a summer festival. The residents make scarecrows and place them in their front gardens. There is one house that I have always admired, as it was obviously a nondescript bungalow once, but the inhabitants have cleverly clad it in clapboard, so that it looks like a New England style.

Their scarecrow gave away that they were Aussies. It was holding tell tale signage. They were obviously pro-European. One sign was pointing to Bognor if the country remained IN Europe. The other was a sign to Bondi Beach if the vote was for OUT. I wonder if they have sold the house by now.

Today, I am having brunch with two Aussie friends in Chelsea, before one heads home for a stint. Like many Aussies, they are land locked here due to work commitments. I wonder if they dream of the surf like me?

Tonight we are going with Hurlingham friends to the Curzon cinema in Chelsea to watch, live from the theatre, The Deep Blue Sea. Everyone takes a picnic to eat at interval. It is the new thing. If you can’t get a ticket to the theatre, you go to the cinema and watch it on film in real time. No possibility of product placement marketing on these occasions.

 

Today the weather has deteriorated. The summer weather has broken. It isn’t tragically raining, and hailing, and windy, but there is a hint of autumn sniffing around. Soon the days will draw in, earlier and earlier.

The antidote to really foul weather, for me, is a break somewhere in the sun. Sloanes disapprove of ‘sunny abroad’ if they are made out of the old mould. You need to just stoically face the cold. Stiff upper lip and all that, which means that their top lip is frozen.

When we moved to Chelsea in 2003, we went back to Oz for Christmas. With so much upheaval, I had to go back to the red earth and the pounding surf, which reassuringly, day after day, 24/7, rolls in from the Pacific. Hello, says the sun over the Pacific rim, I am here today to make your day – happy.

Oz at Christmas. Bliss. Forget all our troubles! Down tools and leg it from cold England. Forget the turkey, stuffing, white sauce, parsnips, brussels sprouts and redcurrant jelly. Actually I love white sauce; it’s white sauce with onions and bread and herbs. I love the whole cold weather Christmas, with possible snow. But there is something about a baking hot day and having Christmas in Oz. You go off to church with the sound of cicadas in your ears, not church bells. Aussies wear shorts to church on Christmas day, not knitted sweaters with reindeer trotting along their chests. It’s as informal as British Christmas is formal. Polar opposites.

Even as we ate our food after church, usually some hot food, like pork and crackling, Stan’s favourite, with a few local treats as well, like prawns and oysters, you could hear the waves crashing, on the golden sand, down at the beach. You may have a few British treats, but let’s face it, tomorrow you’ll be down at the beach again, swimming in the waves, cooling down. Thankful that, tonight, Stan will be chucking a prawn on the barbie.

I love that with all the change that has happened to me, over the last twenty eight years, the constant has been my pilgrimages home. I still call Australia home.

Ironically, yesterday I went with my friend Matilda, named after Waltzing Matilda, possibly, but who is more British than British, to the south coast at Emsworth to walk and watch the sail boats. We both stood and gazed for a moment. She said, “It’s beautiful.” Whether  you’re an Aussie or a Brit, you can love the water. Love the sea. I can’t be friends with someone who doesn’t have that connection with the “warder”, which is the way some Aussies pronounce “water.”

Today, I am having lunch with one of the three Hon.s in my life: she is a tonic.

Back in London by lunchtime. Summer is almost over. I will have to get that top lip ready for the ice to come.

 

 

 

 

Today the sky is clear, and the sun is revving up for a hot day. How long will this blissful weather last?

Yesterday, Niki and Piers brought their eight year old son, Ben, to swim and have lunch in the sun. Matilda, our mutual friend, joined us from London. Geoff played water polo with Ben, just as he used to play with Hugo at the same age: energetically and loudly. The years melted away. Where had time gone since Hugo was young enough to be carried like I now carry Domino, our Italian greyhound?

 

When we moved to Chelsea, Hugo had a year to go until he went to preparatory school at eight. There were about five schools to send him to near Chelsea. We decided we liked the looked of Sussex House, a tall, Norman Shaw designed, school in Cadogan Square, reminiscent of a Dutch building, just behind Sloane Square.

The dynamo headmaster, Nicholas Kaye, is fascinated by architecture and personally restored the school in high-Victorian style, complete with William Morris wallpaper. He lives ‘above the shop’, at the very top of the building. Even though the school lacks a playground, it has a first class art department, and, in the past, it has produced a number of champion fencers. It was reputed to be pastoral; that was the main thing we liked about it.

The staff, who dressed with academic gowns, seemed to know all the boys well. There was an ex-Sargeant, who patrolled the front door, but he did a lot more than that. He messed around with the boys, kept them in check and helped them if they needed assistance. He was a top bloke; a rough diamond with a big heart. The school had a Harry Potter feel about it; in fact, Daniel Radcliffe, who played Harry, went to the school.

The big issue, was that it was notoriously hard to get into. Anyway, Hugo sat the test shortly after our relocation to Chelsea, and we were delighted, and relieved, that he was offered a place. We could stop sweating. Strange things happen to some parents in the run up to school entrance exams. They wish that they could sit the test for their children. They try to impart last minute knowledge as they drive the child to the test, as if that could really help them to pass. I know, because I was, sadly, one of those parents. It is a brutal and competitive process!

We had four things that needed to slot into place to make the move north of the river successful: sell the house, buy a house, find a school for both Anna and then Hugo. Three out of four were in the bag.

For the time being, I had to continue to commute back south, over Chelsea Bridge, to take Hugo to his existing school. It was a pain, but it had to be done. After he started, the following year, I had the most blissful school commute. Down Kings Road to Sloane Square, then left by Peter Jones into Cadogan Square – drop Hugo – then onto to Beauchamp Place past Diana’s old haunt, the restaurant San Lorenzo, left into Kensington Road (I could see Harrods in my rearview mirror), past the Brompton Oratory/V &A Museum/Natural History Museum and then left into Queen’s Gate – to drop Anna.

Matilda had a sleepover last night, so we are heading to the sea for the morning. Domino regards her as part of the family, so he cheekily pushed her door opened this morning, licked her face and insisted on getting under the sheets.

 

 

It has been lovely weather for the last few days. But Summer is dying. The leaves are turning brown, and soon they will start to drop.

It is the same time of year that we upped sticks from Clapham, moved the children, started Anna in a new school, put the furniture into storage, moved into a shoe box of a rental and hoped that we would find a new home to buy.

But there were lots of positives to keep up spirits.

It was surreal living in the heart of Chelsea, like in tourist land, around the corner from The Natural History Museum, The Science Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was like being on holiday every day, at first. I would take Hugo to look at automated dinosaurs, life size Tyrannosaurus Rexes and raptors, on the way home from school. Or walk on the escalator through planet earth with the sound of moving lava cracking around you. Or go in a space ship with simulated flight. It was fun for the children.

And for me, beautiful objects, art and antiquities, to gaze at from time to time, at the multitude of museums and galleries. Walking in Hyde Park, with Kensington Palace in the background, almost daily.

We trekked from Clapham to see the flowers piled outside the gates of Kensington Garden after Diana died in 1997. Now that we lived nearby, some six years later, the children frequently played at the Diana Memorial Playground. It always made me feel a little sad.

Everything was at your fingertips: shops, restaurants, museums, art galleries and parks. I was like a child in a sweet shop.

But there was the nagging problem of finding a house to buy. We saw a number of houses. We made an offer on a house in Fulham, but someone outbid us. The estate agent rang me on my mobile and tried to persuade me to up our offer. Her words: “You will regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t buy the house.” Her words made me sick with anxiety. Was she right?

The truth is that we would have regretted it bitterly if we had bought that house. As it transpired, the house that we bought was near both the children’s schools, and we could make a life in the community, not commute into the area as many did.

Today I have friends coming for lunch, and we will be able to sit in the garden.