Through the curtains Sunday morning there was a hint of sun – a muted, suggestive hint, coloured like a round-cornered photograph from the Seventies, of daylight and a cloudless sky. “Il fait beau?” I said, and I closed my sleepy eyes, and Olive looked out and he said, “Ouais.” “J’ai une bonne idée,” I said.

Outside the garden shop on Church Street, the mistletoe was out, and the pavement was lined with Christmas trees. The air was crisp and scented of a gnome’s forest of pine.



We took a bus and a train and emerged on a hill in Hampstead. At Gail’s, across the street, the poppyseed muffins were in bloom in the window. Flask Walk, narrow and low, opened out into a sweet lane and its handsome brick houses. Here is imaginary London – its warm brick homes, its curving streets, its ageless porcelain tiles spelling out street names in brick walls.

We took Willow Road to the heath, keeping an eye out for No. 2. No. 2 is Erno Goldfinger’s brick-and-glass layer cake of a Modernist house, a creation so offensive, they say, that Ian Fleming, a Hampstead local, was driven to name one of his fictional villains after the architect.

Past No. 2 and down the street, the heath was grand and wide and green. We watched the ducks on the pond, and the dogs, and the ducks again. We climbed Parliament Hill, and on the top a kite with a rainbow tail swooped and swirled and loop-de-looped. We squelched in the mud and walked through the long grass, and afterwards we watched the gulls arrange themselves like baubles on a festive branch.

Our fingers were very cold, later, and we warmed them on a toasted mortadella sandwich from the fancy deli on the high street. There were surprises in there: a gherkin. A sundried tomato.

These are the days the sun comes in through the curtains.