The weather report yesterday predicted a 34 per cent chance of rain – what’s a girl to do with this information? Suz and I skirted the city – me on the Overground going anticlockwise round the top, and she on the National Rail clockwise round the bottom – and found each other at Richmond, with a sugar-sprinkled Eccles cake for sustenance.

Through the turning streets of the sweet town centre, as if a bright red tinplate toy bus were being steered by a child’s pudgy fingers through the most picturesque of wooden toy villages, our double-decker lurched and shifted, then headed south along the Thames, south along the cows in the fields, down Petersham Road lined on both sides with lush green. “We have to get off at the stop past the nurseries,” I said, “then walk back towards it, so we have to keep a look out.” Suz jabbed at the window with a finger – “There! There!” – and in a flurry we were ringing the bell, flying down the stairs, stepping off the bus into a light drizzle growing ever more insistent. So. This is a 34 per cent chance of rain.



“We are going to Petersham Nurseries,” I’d e-mailed Mowmy in the morning. “There will be flowers and lunch.” And how! Past the smiling, dark-haired German baker lady selling biscuit men and bars of Milka chocolate and plump loaves of seeded bread in her green-and-white minivan – “Hallo!” she said, and “Hallo!” we said back – and past the succulent-sounding Ham Polo Club, past the ruddy-cheeked children outside the country-house-looking German School and down a dirt road punctuated with puddles of rain from earlier in the week, the sunflowers were in bloom, the zinnias, the pansies, the giant, glamorous dahlias in pinky-red and orangey-red, in crimson and cerise, the reds of mythical amaranths, the reds, surely, of the silk daybeds, behind carved wooden shutters, of Mughal emperors.

Here – and by now the drizzle had stopped just as it had started – late strawberries hung from suspended baskets dangling bits of moss and earth, and lavender stalks exploded from stone planters. Roses nodded and peeked out from wooden crates. We buried our noses in large clumps of sweet, seductive jasmine, we rubbed soft, furry sage leaves between thumb and forefinger. Fat lemons hung, heavy, at the entrance to the teahouse, and magnolias in crisp whites nestled among waxy, deep-green leaves. “Oh!” I said, as I bent down to sniff, “they smell just like a magnolia candle!”



We wove our way through the greenhouse-bazaar and its higgledy-piggledy just-so mix of wrought-iron chairs and weathered wooden cabinets. Blushing cactii sat on shelves with antique linens and fine stemmed glasses; high rubber boots and shiny new spades lined up by the seed packets; scented candles rested under large bell jars, each identified by a paper label written in a swirling hand. “What’s that?” I said, and I pointed toward a huge sieve-like implement, some 40 centimetres across. Its round cane frame held a wire grid. “For sorting through earth lah,” Suz said, “there are all these bits in the dirt.” “Or,” she said, then, considering, “for panning for gold.” From the back of the room, a modest hubbub and a muted symphony of chinks-tinks-clinks from the lunchtime crowd.



Oh! To lunch here everyday!, under carpets draped, tent-like, from the ceiling, and with flowers at each table, each blooming dahlia like the fat lady at the opera. So this is where the ladies of Richmond go when they want to go to India while the kids are at school.

We drank homemade Amalfi lemonade from wine glasses, the gentle fizz tickling our tongues. We ordered fried courgette flowers, a wild lump of buffalo mozzarella, and borlotti beans like pampered babies. We ordered a thick, black-edged bruschetta topped with sautéed girolles and a swath of parma ham, its length just right for dangling above an eager cat at the dinner table. “Come,” we said, and we chin-chinned with our wine glasses of lemonade, and dessert was but a hint in the air.



We sat at the long table in the tea hut of a teahouse later, with a tray of tea and cakes – a crumbly lemon polenta for one and an almond-studded lemon poppyseed for the other. It is likely we talked about our lives, it is likely we laughed long and hard. What I remember most, though, is the light coming up the three steps and in the door. It was that quality of light – thick, you know, and hushed, for floating in – at the very edges of a dream.

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.

You heard it here first: London is a win. Henny and John’s cozy Schomberg House flat in Westminster was the perfect place to house a girl for just shy of five days, what with the view of red brick and chimneys through the window before falling asleep, and the Regency Café on the corner for breakfasts.

It’s funny how you can go away for just a few days and then you come back and it’s like you’ve just had some grand two-week vacation. London was grey and rainy and rainy and grey, although now and again the sky taunted us with blue; still, with the unhurried days of walking around taking in the city with my trusty £1.95 London tourist map, sometimes stopping to talk to the geese in Saint James Park, it was good.

In London: Henny of the smiling eyes, who will always be remembered for having led the Yellow team to victory in 1992, who whipped up a beef bourgignon for us while I sat about eating German chocolates, who is a swimming fiend, who saw a girl at the Portobello market with a giant chocolate donut and immediately understood that we needed to find ourselves our own giant chocolate donuts. Between the two of us (Henny and me, not, like, me and the donut), all sorts of new phrases were created this vacation—“Can’t spend all day at the Royal Mews!”; “If you find someone who doesn’t make you feel crazy, then go for it.”; “Simslike democracy.”; “Eh, house clothes! we can put on house clothes!” John, who puts up with our constant chortling and giggling, even when his bemused “It’s really not that funny” makes us laugh even harder. He has made an amazing book with drawings so beautiful and gorgeously clever they make your head hurt: birds and houses and flowers and gnomes and pumpkins. Swirls and whirls and vines and leaves. He makes architect jokes, which he admits “aren’t laugh-out-loud funny,” but they make us laugh out loud anyway. Thushala, still mad as ever, with stories of unco-operative kids in her dentist’s chair, camisoles in five-degree weather, big eyes, wide smile, laugh free. Gen, newly moved to Paris, enjoying a London weekend with her affable husband, Eric. We admired Eric’s natty striped and checked button-downs—the Paris influence? No, he’d gone shopping in Brunei. Christián, from Barcelona, the gayest straight man around, whose birthday we celebrated at an unfortunately Jude Law-less pub in Primrose Hill. Christián got more and more Rik Mayall-esque throughout the night as he drank, perfecting the amused lip-curl just before he’d throw his head back in laughter. Regina, from Bavaria, whose spiky hair I admired from across the room. Next time I’m in London we’re going to go see the greyhound races together. Eight dogs and a metal rabbit! Josh, from Minnesota via Paris. He was funny, that one, what with the American-in-France affect. He had good shoes, maybe Campers, brown, with a very rounded toe. He was a storyteller: “So they were in Belize, a small country in Central America. . .,” “Well, I saw this girl, who was way too good a dancer to be French. . .,” “Oh, he was awful, he was so greedy, I can’t tell you how many times he stole from me. . . .” Hao, who looked like a Hong Kong pop star, who’d just proposed to his girlfriend, on bended knee, in Paris, at the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Also in London: Hakkasan, where the waitresses are snooty like crimped poodles, where they serve a tasty mango-mint cocktail, and where they’ll bring a large wooden bowl of prawn crackers if you ask—the largeness of which we marveled at, before we three girls tucked it all away. Gig’s Fish Shop and Kebab House, where I was accosted, upon entry, by (a) the salty, meaty, salivatory kebab smell, and (b) the take-away line winding round the room. Happily, there was one free table for me in the back to sit and read The Face while noshing on rock salmon and chips, and a Ribena. Belgo Centraal, where, because it was Friday night, we had to wait forty-five minutes, and then ten minutes, and then five minutes, for a table; where, when we finally got a seat, I was told they were out of rocket—but who runs out of rocket? even if it’s 9:45 on Friday night? really, especially because it’s 9:45 on a Friday night? Caffe Carluccio’s in Saint Christopher’s Place off Oxford Street, where we ordered Bicerins, which are espresso in the bottom of a coffee cup, a small thing of thick melted chocolate, and a small thing of full-cream milk, all presented on a silver tray, for you to mix as you will.

Used to be in London, now in Brooklyn: very luxe Prestat chocolates, discovered in the very luxe Carnaby Street store, Liberty; jar of Christmas champagne and strawberry conserves from Marks and Spencer, the price reduced twice to 49p; massive tube of Smarties; 1870s porcelain pot that used to contain Atkinson’s Rose Cold Cream, the happy gain of a Saturday morning at the Portobello markets; Alain de Botton’s new book, with pretty printed endpapers; skirt with a red-and-pink-flower print from Selfridges (if only it weren’t bloody snowing right now).

The desire, simmering over the last couple of years, to move to London heats up by the day. Plus, I got home midnight on Monday to a mailbox of magazine subscriptions, including one ElleGirl April 2004, in which my horoscope says I am considering a big move. Holy bloody moley.