Get the picture?

BTW, I have to say, I’m v impressed by how Gideon’s career has moved from the architectural monthlies to the house and garden magazines to the news sections of the broadsheets, I really am, and I’m glad he’s leading the campaign against all these basement ozone pools everyone is putting in around us or, shd I say, you.

Anyway, must dash. Ralph has found an au pair, and put her on the train from Waterloo. I’ve got to pick her up from Godminster. All I know, she’s called Ana. Full name, ‘Ana from Poland’.

Obviously, I can’t wait to meet her.

Love,

Mimi x

I press send and hurtle into the Subaru.

Now I’m back from G’minster. With Ana.

I’m sitting in the kitchen with the Telegraph open on the table on the Court and Social page, with that sinking feeling, which I know is to do with the fact that Ana is here, and already, I can tell… I don’t think it’s going to work.

Why did I ever think it would? Having decided that Ralph was right, and that I really did need an extra pair of hands, especially with the driving, I now think he was barking even to suggest it. Two pubescents and one pre-teen… one generally grumpy and absent old sod of an Old Etonian husband… one bored, not to mention hormonal, housewife… In fact, I feel even sorrier for her than I do for me.

She’s away from home living with a family that I described in the Gumtree ad as ‘chilled, laidback and welcoming’ and now she, like me, is facing grim reality.

So Ana is unpacking her stuff into the spare bedroom (she called it ‘her accommodations’) and I am trying to put a brave face on it, despite the obvious fact that we are never going to have anything in common. If Ana and I had been speed dating, we would have given each other three seconds. Now, we have – in theory at least – a year under the same roof to get through.

As we drive through the village I say, there’s the pub! and there’s the shop! and there’s the church! The war memorial! And here’s the village green, if you’re into maypoles and Morris dancing (I’ll explain later), and this is important, this is the recycling place, where I bring all our bottles, ha ha, and oh yes, there’s the bus stop, where you can get the bus to Godminster and Bridport, there’s a cinema there now, it’s repertory and arthousey and rather good, and now, here we are, this is us, the turning past the church by this old milestone.

I dart her a quick look, and she’s not looking out of the window, drinking in the sublime English scenery, a vista of woods and fields and grazing sheep so beautiful it brings tears to my own eyes, every day, and one that Ana is unlikely ever to have seen before in her entire life. She is checking her mobile. Then she says, what is this thing, a ducks crossing? I almost hug her, as she has found the sign between the duck pond and green in friendly lower-case writing (rather than hectoring shouty capitals) that is supposed to charm drivers into slowing down for ducks at least worthy of notice.