1. To be swept up by our friends and whisked away into the deep Sussex countryside on a visit. I like this particular friend because we both speak nineteen to the dozen -- mainly about work with words -- and I never feel as if I ought to be polite and slow down for her.
2. Diana's garden is full of good things for our children to eat. I crack nuts with my teeth and hand the kernels to Alec; I lift Bettany up to pick white grapes from the vine. I am sent off to find "a collapsed tomato plant in a tyre", but the seeds from our haul are running down my greedy baby's sleeve by the time we get back.
3. I am astonished and awed to see Diana's daughter-in-law arrive with a baby on one arm and a bouncy chocolate brown puppy attached to the other -- that's some accomplished mothering going on there.
4. Bettany bites the back of my leg as I reach up to put something in a larder. I read the riot act and put her on the doormat. She doesn't seem to understand but sits there so patiently and politely that I want to melt, but of course I can't because biting is becoming habit of hers and is about as serious as it gets in the infant world.
