“Oh!” I said when Emily called yesterday morning, “I tell you, I have tea in my bag because when we were leaving the house this morning I said, ‘I’m just going to bring the tea in case we’re invited over for teatime.’” “I was calling,” she said, “to invite you over for tea.” Which is why, closing in on four in the afternoon—and by this time I also had in my bag a box of Montezuma truffles from Suz—after poking around the antiques market at Camden Passage—there’d been the little sterling silver dessert forks, and the bone-handled pie servers, and the tins that said “Sugar” and “Flour” and “Rice” and “Lentils”, and I’d wanted them all, but when I went back for a second look it was really just to say good-bye—closing in on four in the afternoon, we found ourselves, me and the boy, in the garden out back in Angel, with a tray of wheaten crackers and Vegemite, and some Tim-Tams, and, indeed, Emily’s Blue Mountain tea, le fameux, English tea hand carried from Paris, just because we can. The afternoon sloped by, tea on the deep green tablecloth and the green canopy of leaves above us, and it seemed like a long time since I’d sat just to sit.



There’ve been the houseguests, so many houseguests, and there’ve been the parties, the football match parties—me, football, yes, I know, unexpected, but I mean, (a) Zinedine Zidane, please, smile some more for me, and (b), parties mean cake. “There’ll be snacks,” I’d emailed the crew to entice them to France-Brazil last Saturday, but then I think no one was more surprised than me when it turned out, come kick-off time at eight, that the snacks included an array of meats and cheeses, and a curly pasta salad, and a salad salad, and three cakes for nine people, and mojitos all around. “Mojitos are made from mosquitos,” Emily said, as she squeezed the limes into the penguin cafetière. “Hee hee hee,” I said. “I stole that from Jerry Seinfeld,” she said, “you would have found out sooner or later.”

There was a summer dance party in Paris, with cherry clafoutis and hunks of Cantal. The air was thick with singing and cigarettes, and we held melting mojitos in our sweaty hands. Sometime at three in the morning, the last glowing guest departed into the night. It’d just started to rain by then, and we opened the wide windows to the cold, and the sharp, and the fresh.



There was a Sunday trip to Cambridge for punting and a picnic, Pimm’s on the waterways and the bottle of sun lotion passed from one boat to the other. We moored for ice creams, and I dangled my feet in the water while I licked at a Strawberry Split.



One night, there was me and Jason and a table outside at the Eagle in Farringdon. That was nice, with the cuttlefish ink risotto and the sloppy burger ordered at the grill inside, the warm ale that made him make a face. The individual espresso maker and the twin pastéis de natas arrived with the evening chill, but the espresso cupped in small hands staved off the cold for a while yet. We walked home down the back streets, Lamb’s Conduit with its curious candy store and Red Lion, where the dusty discount bookshop used to sit.