The point of the email. The ‘ask’ as Ralph puts it, with inverted commas, of course.

I’m going to answer it straightaway while I have the wind in my sails and bit between teeth – which means that the dogwalk and the kitchen garden will just have to wait.

From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]

Dear Clare

Thanks so much for your lovely email. Crikey, it’s been a long time. It feels about a hundred years since I was last in Fresh & Wild (which has, apparently, closed) trying to persuade myself that a large slab of vegan tofu banana cheesecake for pudding was, actually, really healthy.

I’m really glad, tho’, you got in touch, and don’t remotely mind that the main object of your contact (reading between the lines) was how to get baby Joe into nursery at Ponsonby Prep. Isn’t he getting on for two now? I presume you put him down in utero. And that he is completely proficient in the basics – sackbut, Albanian nose-flute, Sanskrit, etc.

Well… I have to warn you.

One Notting Hill mother – Helene, you must remember her, that power-wife married to Goldman Sachs banker on £5m a year –virtually went down on her knees and begged all the other mothers inc. me to compose handwritten letters of personal recommendation to Doc H on behalf of her daughter Camille. This would have been fine but 1. I’d never met Camille and 2. Camille was all of 5 months, and I couldn’t really vouch for her precocity in key skills like napping, smearing pureed sweet potato on her high chair, but that didn’t matter to Helene, of course.

Helene in addition sent the admissions secretary a bunch of flowers every week for a whole school year before even getting on the waiting list, so watch out. Doc H reminded Helene that Ponsonby (where it is, I remind you, harder to get a place than a table at the Ivy) allocates only five places per month, on a first come first served basis. He said it was better not to leave it until five months after delivery but to ‘schedule a caesarean’ for the 30th or the 31st (as if real due date and Mother Nature, etc., a complete irrelevance) so that ‘in an ideal world’ she would have been first in the queue with a filled-in registration form on the first of the month.

When I told Ralph he listened in silence and then commented, ‘It after all wasn’t easier for a Camille to pass through the doors of Ponsonby Prep ho ho ho than a rich man to enter the kingdom of god ha ha ha,’ and laughed out loud at his own not very good joke.

God, Clare, I thought I would feel all cross and hoity when I saw the email was from you, but I didn’t. I felt pleased. I now realize, and I hope you believe me, that I’m glad YOU bought the house from Ralph and no one else. I was knocked sideways at the time, and now I really am OK about it.