Sunny again.

When Anna started at Queens Gate in the autumn of 2003, there were only two small classes per year in the junior school. She got to know everyone rapidly. She made friends with a beautiful, part-Indian girl.

Anna told me that Laurie’s parents were very good looking. She’d met them at the school drop off.

“Oh…really? Do you know their names?” “Simon and Yasmin,” Anna answered. My ears pricked up. Could they be Simon and Yasmin Le Bon? He of Duran Duran fame? I had a huge crush on him in my teens in Oz.

“What do they look like?” I asked nonchalantly. “She’s very exotic looking, and he is the opposite. He’s tall and blonde. Her mother was a model.”

I was instantly excited. It turned out that they were not, in fact, the Le Bons, but they happened to be very good friends with them. How ironic, that they had the same Christian names.

Simon turned out to be a freelance journalist. Yasmin was a writer, model and an events organiser. They seemed to know everybody that was worth knowing on the social circuit. They went to the Summer Party at the Serpentine. They were regulars at film premieres. They had front row seats at Fashion Week. They holidayed in Ibiza with the jet set. I suppose you could say that they were a power couple. And Anna had play dates at their house, just off Gloucester Road, regularly.

They were extremely nice to me: always asking me in for a chat and tea when I collected Anna. They loved Anna, so they made an effort with me. I loved Laurie.

But I was not part of their tribe. I was not part of the social calendar, the sort of events that are reported in Hello and Tatler. Yasmin and Simon were regularly photographed for these publications. They knew our neighbours, Caroline and Cem Habib. They went to their lavish wedding in a palace in Istanbul. The wedding was in the social pages.

Yasmin was a muse for Julian Macdonald, the fashion designer. There was a launch of his new line at the Berkeley Hotel, a few years after Anna and Laurie became joined at the hip, with tea and champagne. The press would be covering it. Yasmin would be photographed in the clothes. The place would be packed with the right sort of people.

Anna was asked to go and keep Laurie company. Yasmin asked if I’d like to come to the press launch and keep an eye on the girls, while she was parading the new designs. I said that I would, of course, love to.

I met up with them in a suite that Yasmin had been given the use of for the day. Anna had been with them throughout the earlier fashion shoot. The room was luxurious. There were lovely things to eat and to drink for everyone.

At tea I sat next to Lady Victoria Hervey. She is a toff, but she is also what is known as an IT-girl, someone who is famous for being famous. She was immensely good-looking and well groomed. I was dumb struck. Scrambling around for words, I blurted out, “Do you know, you’re even prettier than in your photos.” She looked completely taken aback. “Thank you.” What else could she say?

Another mother at the school gate was Eva, the founder of Caramel Baby & Child, an upmarket clothing line for youngsters. She became firm friends with Yasmin. They were part of the same world. Whereas I was an interloper, only gaining access through Anna and not in my own right.

It was a fascinating world of beauty, glamour and style. I wouldn’t have batted an eyelid if I arrived one day at Yasmin and Simon’s house to find Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue, sipping tea at the kitchen table. One day, when I went to pick up Anna from a sleepover, I bumped into Simon Le Bon on his way out. So pigs can fly!

Today, Geoff is visiting his old school in Kent, Tonbridge.

 

The weather today in Hampshire is what you experience, everyday, in Singapore – on the Equator. Relentlessly the same; very humid. 

 Humidity is at saturated levels today. You can almost see the drops of moisture in the air, like pearls about to drop to the ground.

 Summer is holding on. Like squeezing the last of the tomato ketchup (we call it tomato sauce in Oz) out of a bottle onto the meat in a hamburger; I am making the most of these last days of summer.

We were meant to be back in London last night, but a road problem detoured us in a loop back to the Old Rectory. So I am living in a foreign country today, via the weather, in rural England.

That was the way it felt when we moved to South Kensington in 2003. It felt, excitingly, foreign and exotic. I had adapted to the traits of the pheasants and stags in Wandsworth, in South London. I was a Sloane Sheila for strewth’s sake! I had reinvented myself. I wore Alice bands in the early 90s. Had frilly collars like Princess Di.

 In South Kensington, I felt like I had arrived on Mars. It was different. Very different. I loved that my senses were on ‘red alert’.  

There is a scene in Star Wars (Film IV- 1977) where Hans Solo, Harrison Ford, goes into a bar on some rogue space station, and there is every inter-galactic type there, as if the whole of the galaxy is having a drink at that bar. There is every alien you can imagine in  a different body form; some have a mono-eye, and they all speak weirdly. That is how I felt when we moved to South Kensington. Obviously everyone had two eyes, but it was a banquet of different types.

It was one thing to move from Sydney to Wandsworth, but another to move to Chelsea.

At the front door of Queen’s Gate School, each morning, the whole world was there when I dropped Anna off each day. The United Nations was represented. It was only a front door, as the school was several tall town houses, joined together by knocking through walls. There was no playground. No space.

 Where I grew up in Bexley North, the White Australia policy, our shameful racist past in my homeland, ensured that mainly only whites turned up at the school gate. A few clever Chinese, a smattering of Greeks and Italians: that was the full extent of shaking it up in the gene pool.

 At Queen’s Gate the whole world was represented, at least on the female side. And I loved it from day one.

Greeks, Chinese, Spanish, Italians, Belgian, Germans, Balkans, Russians, Arabs, Amercians, Indians, Irish, and the descendant of one Aussie Sheila, Anna, my daughter.

 There were two stellar teachers there: Mrs Neale and Mrs Webb. They were both middle-aged, experienced teachers; they were vocational teachers. They liked the look of the Wilmots.

And the terrain: beautiful buildings and museums everywhere. Bellissima! We were living amongst the monuments.

Before long, I was class representative for the Parents and Teachers’ Association. Before long, Geoff was announcing the races at Sports Day. It may have felt foreign, but it suited us down to the ground. For a Sheila from Down Under, it was just the ticket. I felt like I had won the lottery. I had a large playing field in which to play. At last, so many different world views. So many different life experiences.

I could just hide under a gum tree for a bit and relax. 

 

The weather is still baking hot this morning. The sun will sizzle later, hot enough to fry an egg if I cracked it on a paving stone in the midday sun. It is as if all my pining for Aussie weather has “dreamed” it true, like the aborigines magic things up during their corroborees.

I drove back to the Old Rectory very early this morning before the traffic built up, to water the garden. It was parched.

I have vivid memories of my grandmother, Vera, Mum’s mother, religiously watering her roses after the sun went down, at her red brick bungalow in Ashbury, a suburb in Sydney. She longed for a romantic English rose garden in a climate that was not partial to a flower as delicate as a rose. Wattle, bottlebrush and waratahs, with their bright colours and robust forms, thrive in this dry climate.

We are having an Aussie style summer now in England. It is not the restrained landscape evoked by Vivaldi in his measured The Four Seasons, the 18^th century classical violin concerti he composed to mark the changes, season by season, in an English year. No, the sort of weather we are having, at the moment, is definitely full on heavy metal.

After Anna secured a place at her new school in South Kensington, Queen’s Gate Junior School, we had to find somewhere to live as soon as possible. Elms Crescent sold quickly in September, and we had to vacate by November.

I found a tiny little house in Elystan Street to rent, around the corner from The Conran Shop and Ralph Lauren at Brompton Cross. We didn’t want to waste money on rent. However, there was nothing suitable on the market to buy. It was as cheap as chips for the locality. It had two small bedrooms, a bathroom, a tiny kitchen and the smallest sitting room you can imagine. When people visited they thought that the sitting room was the hall.

Most of our belongings went into storage. We would not see them for a year. I gave away a lot of furniture, as I knew that our house in Chelsea or Fulham would be smaller. I had my heart set on Chelsea. I wanted to be in the thick of it. I didn’t want to be a tourist. I wanted to be a local. I was dreamin’. The prices were exorbitant. It would take a miracle to find something within our budget. Prices were increasing alarmingly.

Still, I was comforted by the fact that Anna loved her new school. I would drop her off and then drive Hugo back over the bridge to Clapham to Eaton House, where he would need to stay for a year. Then I went for a cup of coffee, as the traffic back into central London would not clear until 10am.

Today, I will try to stay cool. Tonight, Anna and I are heading back to London.

 

 

It is a cloudless start to the day, and by the look of it no clouds will appear. It is the sort of blue sky that looks steadfast in rejecting any interlopers, like nuisance clouds.

Anna is home from her travels. Hooray! Last night she slept safely in her English bed at the Old Rectory. Today, we are going to catch up, relax and reconnect. It was wonderful to see her pull up in the car with Geoff yesterday. We sat looking through her amazing photos of Colombia and New York last night.

When I am not with the children, they exist in my subconscious as dependents. In my dreams, they often return to younger versions of themselves. When, in fact, they are young adults. They can legally make decisions for themselves: marry, reproduce and vote: with or without my permission. It is a difficult thing to get your head around. Like seeing an older face in the mirror, when you swore you still only looked forty.

At the beginning of 2003, when Anna and Hugo were nine and seven in turn, we made decisions for them. We made judgments, for better or worse, about their futures.

They both didn’t like their schools at this stage, and they were bumping along averagely academically. I walked Anna to school on the first day of the school year from our house in Elms Crescent, in the Abbeville Village. She was clearly miserable. I asked her, “Are you really that unhappy at school?” “Yes,” was the answer I dreaded.

I walked home, pondering, across the dried out, brown grass of Clapham Common. By the time I opened the front door, I had made a plan of action to put to Geoff.

I rang Geoff at work, and I told him that we should move Anna and Hugo to new schools over the river in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. I had that sixth sense, a feeling in my bones. And that we should obviously sell the house.

Geoff had gone with my sixth sense on numerous occasions in our marriage, even if, on paper, they were a bit crazy. I chose Elms Crescent, when it was twice the size, or more, of our first home in Taybridge Road. And it clearly needed a lot of work. It was a good decision long term. It felt like home from the moment we moved in, even with a leaking roof and damp problems.

I rang Queen’s Gate School and Francis Holland across the river to see if they had places for Anna. Both schools had junior and senior schools. (Hugo was not due to move for another year, so he could finish his time at Eaton House. Boys move at eight to a preparatory school for senior entrance at thirteen.)

Francis Holland was full. Queen’s Gate had a few places mid stream in the junior school. Anna could stay there for two years and then go into the senior school at the correct age of eleven. Single sex schools have a different system. It is a nightmare to navigate if you are foreign.

It is notoriously difficult to secure a place in central London senior schools, and, this way, we were getting Anna in early, ahead of the game. She would still need to sit the Entrance Test for the senior school, but she would be one of theirs by then.

I passionately believed (still do) from dot, that one of the most important gifts I could give the children was a first-rate education. Education opens up horizons; it did for me. And if they were unhappy, they could not flourish.

First rate schools were, still are, few and far between in London; academies were a thing of the future in 2003. We had started in the private sector, so it made sense to continue along that route. So Anna went the next day and sat the entrance test for Queen’s Gate. They rang later in the day and offered her a place. We faxed our notice to her current school, Broomwood Hall.

We then put the house on the market, and it quickly sold. I was determined to look to the future and not backwards.

Anna found her wings at Queen’s Gate. She won the singing prize every year. Starred in school plays. She quickly excelled academically. She was in the right place – for her. None of these things would have happened if she had stayed put.

Later I have to head up to London for dinner, but I really want to stay put.

 

Today the rain of the last few days has thankfully cleared, and I awoke, in time, to watch the sun rise, sleepily and mistily, above the trees leering over the cricket ground, like old men, at the back of the Old Rectory.

It is a momentous day. Anna, our daughter, is returning from her travels, from Colombia to New York and, finally, to Heathrow.

The sunrise in England is, invariably, a gentle announcement to the new day. Not a brash yell; just a gentle, golden, glowing hello, before the orb reveals its full form in the sky, like a shy youth.

Many times on the Illawarra coast in Australia on our visits back, I crept out of bed to see the giant, invasive orb appear on the eastern horizon of the Pacific Ocean. Closer to the Equator, it announced itself with a hooray, “Let there be light.” It was startling.

I loved the sight of it. It meant a day by the sea, and by the sea, salt and sand and fun. Hamburgers: laden with beetroot and pineapple, bacon and eggs. Local ice creams: Paddle Pops in all the colours of the rainbow, Mango Weiss bars full of fruit like mango, and Golden Gaytimes with salty caramel and choc/biscuit encrusted. Fish and chips and deep fried potato cakes called scallops. Sunburn and peeling noses. Tired muscles from the pounding rollers.

There is a subtle change in the weather at the end of August in England, even on a clear, sunny day. The sun is now losing its intensity, like a fire dying down. The leaves are burning brown and some are falling. The sun will sink to the west earlier and earlier as autumn stealthily approaches, like the long shadow of an unwelcome visitor.

When Anna arrives we will sit in the sun and talk; she can try to communicate her foreign travels to me, but, of course, I will only be able to touch gently, from a distance, the extent of it all. It will be cut off by experience, distance and time.

When we came home from our staycation in Wiltshire at the end of August 2003, it was almost time for the children to go back to school. They were both getting wound up like springs. It dawned on me that it may not be run of the mill nerves. They both didn’t like their respective schools. It was as if, finally, I could properly see this. The summer had shed light on the fact. What were we to do?

Was I being dramatic? It was still a few days until the end of the holidays. We would continue to ponder the situation.

 

 

It is raining. It is a reminder that summer is on the wane. I can barely think about it.

British summer time will end three weeks into September. It is almost the end of August now.

The bank holiday weekend at the end of August is the cut off point in the British psyche; play has ended, and it is back to business. At the start of September the school year begins, and once again London is teeming, full of its inhabitants returned from their holidays. They will be golden brown and healthy. Next week Peter Jones will have queues of parents buying school shoes and uniforms. They give you a number, and they ring when you are close to being seen. They do a record trade.

Twenty eight years ago, to the day, I arrived in England: 19 August, 1988.

Little did I know that I would never, permanently, return to that vast, empty continent of Australia, with its majestic coastline, pounded by a powerful, frothy, turbulent sea. The efforts and toil of its inhabitants appear dwarfed by the water-force at the margins of their existence. The sea makes you feel smaller, less significant. When one is no longer, it will still be.

I met Geoff the day after I arrived at his family home, Stone House, an old rectory in Kent. We were married about six months later. I was landlocked thereafter.

What a change!

For my tenth anniversary of arriving, we celebrated with friends in Salcombe. I cried all day. Then I ate prawns, bought at great expense from a fishmonger, and we drank Aussie sparkling wine. But it was made better by the fact that I was by the sea.

For my twentieth anniversary I was also by the sea. I was in Crete with Geoff and the children. Anna was school friends with a striking Greek, Sophia Pia Zombanakis. She had an elegant mother, Vaggie, who was an ex-dancer, and a Cretan banker father, Andreas, who studied at Harvard like his father, Minos, and she had a younger brother, Minos, who is now at Harvard. Three generations of men at Harvard. They invited us for the day to their holiday home by the sea in Kalives.

It was a petite, extremely  elegant, canary-yellow neo-classical villa. It had only a scattering of bedrooms and a small living room and kitchen. There were colourful lead light windows enticing you to the sea. The sea was almost up to the porch. You could have thrown yourself across the tiny sandy expanse and landed in the water. It was charming.

The pretty villa had been handed down by Sophia Pia’s grandfather, Minos, to her father Andreas. It had been built previously by his citrus-farming father early in the 20th century.

Minos Senior catapulted himself from this small village, leaving his humble beginnings, onto the world-wide banking stage from the late 1950s onwards. He is credited with being the creator of the interest rate formula known as LIBOR. But he never forgot his Cretan roots, returning to Crete over and over again. He finally settled there in his retirement, living in a large compound with spectacular views of the sea.

David Lascelles has written a book The Story of Minos Zombanakis: Banking without Borders about Sophia Pia’s grandfather. Quoting from that book, Minos Senior himself commented: “In Greece, we judge a family by its children…When I go to New York people ask me why I never made a billion dollars – what do I do all the time? I tell them that I spend my life down on Crete in my village, with the family.” 

It was an honour to spend the day with such an extraordinary family. After a large lunch down at the beach taverna, we returned to the house to escape the heat of the day. Andreas showed me the pit marks in the tessellated hall tiles, explaining that they had been made by the boots of German soldiers who requisitioned the house during the second world war.

We then headed back down to the beach in the late afternoon. It was a tradition for the extended family to assemble there for a cool swim, including Minos Senior. It was sweet to see my blonde, fair children swimming with olive skinned beauties.

 

That night we set off for a hill top taverna for dinner. The children stayed behind and ate takeaway. Andreas drove us up a steep, winding dirt track. The cicadas were clicking away, reminding me of Oz. We were treated to a Cretan feast; the family are treated like royalty in that part of Crete. It was marvellous. There were no menus. Delicious course after course appeared. I remember Vaggie eating the snails. I resisted!

There are loads of Greeks in Australia; I felt completely at home.

Tired and happy we arrived back at our hotel well after midnight.

Today, I am getting ready for old friends to come and stay for the weekend: the Corries and the Fothergills.

 

 

The heatwave has broken, like a taut rope that has snapped. Rain is forecast for London.

I drove down to the Old Rectory at 7am this morning, and I could see that it had been raining earlier. The garden’s thirst had been quenched, without me traipsing around with a hose for hours.

After our tour of Switzerland in 2003, we decided to have a summer staycation. By now Anna was 9 and Hugo 7. We borrowed a thatched house in Wilthsire, near Marlborough and did country stuff. The local harvesting had caused a fly infestation, so we arrived to find big sticky tapes, encrusted with dead flies, hanging from exposed beams in the kitchen. I left it to Geoff to change them periodically.

A day trip was made to Bath, a city that means a lot to me. My friend from Uni days in Sydney, Susan Durlacher, had a close connection with the city. Her mother and husband, Joanna and Louis, had a coach house tucked away behind the Royal Crescent.

I stayed with them just after I landed in England in 1988. It was just before Susan’s wedding to Geoff’s brother, David. We became sisters in law. Prince and Princess Illinsky, from Palm Beach, Florida, were staying with them. The house was tiny, but we all managed to squeeze in.

I was transfixed by the perfect Georgian architecture of the city. My eyes were out on stalks as I turned every street corner. It has stayed locked in my heart, as an exquisitely designed city, alongside Paris and Venice. The Georgians in the 18th century flocked there to drink the water from ancient Roman baths. Assembly rooms, that remain today, are built over them. Jane Austen lived there.

We stayed with my parents, Stan and Bev, and brother and wife, Shaun and Wendy, in 1989, after Geoff and I were married in April. Dad was an aesthete by nature, even if he liked a tinnie or two of beer. He relished every aspect of the city; marvelling at the symmetry of the design. From above, the Royal Crescent joined by a road to the Circus looks like a key. Pulteney Bridge over the River Avon reminded me of the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno in Florence.

It was during this staycation that Geoff and I played with the idea of moving from Clapham. I was too much of a Londoner by that stage to consider a move out of London. I dreamt of living in the central area of London where the tourists throng; to be able to stroll in Hyde Park, pop into the Victoria & Albert Museum, walk down Sloane Street to Sloane Square, pop into Portobello Road markets and browse in Harvey Nicholls. If you live in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea you are entitled to a parking permit which spans from Marble Arch to Notting Hill. It covers a vast area.

Little did I know that within a few weeks we would be moving to that area.

Today I am gardening. The flowers are dying, not due to lack of water, but they are fading now as Autumn is around the corner.

 

 

It is baking hot today. The sort of heat that makes lettuce wilt in seconds.

Domino is listless. It is too hot to do much.

I went early to the Hurlingham Club and swam lengths at the outdoor pool before the hordes arrived. I can smell the chlorine lingering on my skin. It stirs so many happy childhood memories of swimming in a pool somewhere in Bexley North, the suburb of my formative years. Maybe it was the Olympic pool at the end of Preddys Road, where my first friend Anne lived on the hill. Maybe it was in her pool with her sister Gill. Or in the Crundwell’s pool next door. Or ours. It didn’t matter. It was coolness in the midst of intense sunshine, searing down from a pale blue, cloudless sky. Just like the sky today in London.

It is in stark contrast to our spring tour of Switzerland, which followed skiing in the Alps, in Verbier, with Geoff’s brother, Patrick. The weather was icy cold, but sunny, by Lake Geneva.

Our first pit stop was Vevey, the home of Charlie Chaplin. We stayed at a charming hotel, the Hotel du Lac, the setting for the Booker prize winning book by Anita Brookner. It was just as in the book; there were long term residents, mainly older, that had their mail delivered to them by staff at breakfast. It was perused whilst they ate their toast and jam. Hotel Trois Couronnes, a short way up the promenade, was the setting for the Henry James novel, Daisy Miller. It tells of a rich, head-strong American girl, Daisy, who behaves badly in polite European society. Does that sound like a particular Kangaroo in the midst of Sloane Rangers in England? Her reputation is ruined, and she tragically dies. Daisy’s reputation, not the Kangaroo’s!

The beauty of Lake Geneva floored and inspired me. Across the glassy lake, majestic pinnacles, snow capped mountains, stand guard like sentries. We walked from Vevey to Montreux, past endless fading mansions. Some had been turned into apartments. Others had been bought by corporations and restored. Thankfully, some were still the abode of wealthy residents, living in style and waking up to a magnificent view each day. As we walked I could see in my mind’s eye the nobles and gentry taking a stroll along the lake in their finery: to take exercise, but also to be admired.

Next stop, after the scene of the chicken Kiev theft, was Bern, the medieval capital. It is perched on a gorge with a curved rushing river surrounding it. It is imposing, forboding and handsome. The ancient aspect of the city enchanted us. Bears are still kept in a bear pit. The vertical facades of the buildings hide vaulted walk ways for pedestrians to escape the weather. The one thing that flummoxed us though, was that there was no night life. Few places to eat. The Bernese obviously like to stay home.

Finally, Lausanne. We saw the famous clock in some ancient square, where ancient figures glide out when the hour is struck, but mostly we just tried to stay warm. It was raining and freezing.

It was a whistle stop tour. I remember the cities. But I mostly remember driving inland from Lake Geneva through snow laden landscapes. Stopping for strudel and hot chocolate in villages that seemed frozen in time as well as by the weather. Marvelling that for months the country was a winter wonderland, like in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia. So different to my Sunburnt Country.

 

 

Still hot summer’s weather today. I am in London to catch up with life in the big city.

Yesterday, I mentioned that it is A level results this week. I hope all my young friends will be happy. Disappointment makes the heart sick.

Geoff went off on a gap year after finishing at Tonbridge, a boys’ boarding school in Kent. During his travels he found himself washing up in a hotel in Interlaken, between Lake Geneva and the capital Bern. So many times he told young Anna and Hugo the story of the stolen chicken Kiev.

It is part of our store of family stories, told over and over again, so they can be repeated almost verbatim. Like the imaginary friend he made up during one particularly long and tedious car journey. His name was Eric the Elf, but Eric was pronounced “Ewic” (Eric had a lisp), and he was in love with Raquel, but Raquel was in love with Gary. Even I found Eric funny, and I consider myself the comic in our family. Eric, forever more, travelled with us on car journeys, until the children were older.

Back to the hotel in Interlaken. One night Geoff was working in the kitchen washing up. Pedro the waiter hid a chicken Kiev in a  drawer to eat later. Geoff saw him hide it. He nicked it and ran outside to eat it in the bushes. When Pedro discovered that his precious morsel had been stolen, he threatened to kill whoever had taken it. Geoff pleaded innocence. Pedro, of course, suspected Geoff, but he could not prove it. Just like Fawlty Towers!

Geoff’s 50th year was a year of much change for our entire family, although this was still eclipsed at the time of his birthday.

We celebrated it in March/April with his youngest brother, Patrick, at his chalet in Verbier, Chalet Alsica, by the sports centre.

Patrick had been living there for some time, and it was a perfect opportunity to introduce the children to skiing. Patrick, of course, looked like he was born on skies and put us all through our paces. Geoff didn’t mind being shown up, as he had always adored his youngest sibling.

 

After two weeks’ wonderful skiing, we went off in search of the hotel in Interlaken, during our tour of Switzerland to celebrate Geoff’s five decades. The kitchen, thirty two years later,  was still exactly the same!

Today, I have friends to see. The summer holidays is isolating at times.

 

 

 

I am now back at the Old Rectory. It is stinking hot today. There is little difference between today in Hampshire, mid-August, and a hot summer’s day in Oz. It’s harvest time in the country. The fields are alive with activity. Like bees swarming over honey.

Nicky Barber is harvesting at her farm near Winchester: the barley and wheat. John, her husband, explained to me that the planter that sowed the crops last spring had a computer programme that precisely recorded the undulation of the fields and pattern of planting, so that the combine harvester working at the moment will be equipped to reap and sort the crops with utmost precision.

The dust that is generated by harvesting is phenomenal in these dry conditions, making the fields look like the Sahara Desert and not the normal green, lush fields of Britain. It reminds me of my heritage, with all my grandmother’s generation, on my mother’s side, deriving their livelihood from farms in the grasslands of NSW just before the Outback. In the summer, it was a sunburnt country.

 

Like in Dorothea Mackellar’s poem My Country:

I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.

We had a BBQ in the Cotswolds on Friday night with the Barbers and other families. In that  last August in Norfolk, on holiday with the Barbers in August 2001, the weather was unseasonably warm. Geoff even managed to get his shirt off, and the children played in streams formed by the outgoing tide. We had lots of barbies on the beach.

There is nothing like the smell of meat being cooked over charcoal, rather than on the stove or oven grill. Stan the Man, my father, was an expert barbecuer. He had a mammoth barbie in every home we lived in, dwarfing the rest of the backyard with its presence, like a shrine. He even kept a roving barbie in the boot of his station wagon, and he would russle up grub for hungry grandchildren after a long day at the beach. He was a barbie legend.

Last Friday in the Cotswolds, before the barbie got going at 6pm, we had a cream tea by a navy and white cricket pavilion. After an afternoon of tennis and games. Nothing like an English summer’s arvo, with tea and scones. And the civilised chatter of pheasants and stags, convivial and pleasant. Many of the young ones were embarking soon on gap years abroad before starting Uni next October. They are anxiously waiting for A-level results this week to determine their Uni places. I am glad those days are behind us.

Geoff had a gap year with his mate Paul. They went everywhere, but for a time he worked in a hotel kitchen in Interlaken, Switzerland. For his 50th birthday, we went skiing and then headed to that very same hotel for old time’s sake. And to see if the drawer where he hid a chicken kiev, to his peril, still existed.

Today, I have to hit the garden and catch up with jobs at the Old Rectory.