I know there is an historic election going on.  And I have voted, that is I have authorised my mother to forge my signature on a postal vote.  And I do care who wins.  But I also believe that the US will survive either way, because we have a constitution that has sustained probably the most liberal (in the old fashioned sense of the word) society in the history of the world, and I think it will keep on doing its job.

Only right now instead of feeling historic I am feeling anxious about my daughter, who is working for the VSO (the British equivalent of the American Peace Corps) in Southwestern Uganda, right on the border of the DRC and Rwanda.  She keeps telling me she is okay, and I know there is no fighting where she is, but there are constant reports in the middle of the night on the World Service about conflicts and mass movements in that area.  

In her world it probably means nothing more than a refugee camp opening up.  But if it opens up I am afraid she will go in to assess the children there, and then I am afraid she will catch something.

This kind of fear for your children has nothing to do with right or wrong or what you have raised them to do.  My daughter has been in Uganda for more than a year because there are people there who need her help.  I am proud of her for that, but I am also counting the weeks (not so many now) until she is home again.  And hoping this new conflict doesn’t mean she puts herself at risk before she comes safely back to me.

I’ve been pretty lucky with my children (touch wood, because I am also superstitious), but this kind of anxiety inevitably reminds me of old anxieties.  You never stop worrying about your kids.  When the Uganda daughter was about 3, and was meant to be taking a nap, instead she got into the flouride tablets that I (wrongly) was giving her to compensate for what wasn’t being added to our water.

I found her with the pills everywhere around her, a few smeared on her mouth.  I had no idea how toxic an overdose might be.  I took her to the emergency room and not long afterwards her father arrived to join me.

The medics all seemed, as I suspected, completely casual about the potential flouride overdose, but a doctor came in and examined her and lingered in a way that surprised me.

When she left I said to my husband, do you think that doctor seemed unusually interested in listening to her heart?

He assured me I was imagining things and we waited.  Nurses brought ipecac and the poor child vomited what turned out to be 3 flouride tablets.  Still we weren’t discharged.

After a while the doctor came back and looked very sober and said,  “Has anyone mentioned that your daughter has a heart murmur?”

I noted, without any satisfaction, that my mother’s instinct wasn’t wrong. The doctor said they weren’t worried at all about the flouride, but they needed to x ray my daughter’s heart. Suddenly we were there for an entirely different reason.  

We waited another hour or two and then the x rays were available.  My husband, who had quit smoking, took it up again in the mean time.  

Finally the doctor said the x rays showed her heart was not enlarged.  That meant there was no immediate danger.  She would be put on a waiting list to see a heart specialist.

We waited three months.  Further tests revealed that the heart murmur was “harmless” and that was the end of that drama.

I’m waiting again now.

Meanwhile the rest of you guys are probably thinking about trivial stuff like who might be the next President of the United States.

I don’t sleep all that well, and since I know that it is mostly because I don’t live all that well, I live with it, in my stoicly Puritan way.  

My way is I wake up between 4 and 5 and begin to sneeze.  I have, in my life, slept with men, children, and pets (sometimes all three).  Now I sleep with a box of Kleenex.  

After awhile, when I have tossed and turned and blown my nose (repeatedly) and tossed and turned some more and stuffed a wad of kleenex up my nose (it’s the preemptive strike theory of sniffling), I turn on the World Service.  That’s on a bad night.  

BBC radio runs until about a quarter to one and then kicks back in at around quarter past five.  In between the World Service takes over.

The BBC starts and finishes each day with the deeply reassuring Shipping Forecast.  There are usually warnings of gales, but the litany of names makes all good Brits feel island safe:  “Faeroes, Fair Isle, Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Cromarty, Forth, Forties, Tyne, Dogger, German Bite, Humber…” and on round the coast to the more familiar “Thames, Dover, Wight, Portland”, then back through the Irish Sea and north to Scotland again.  I don’t know how to explain it except to say that it is like a spell.  If we chant those maritime syllables three times a day we’ll keep safe from all harm.  It’s a hymn not just for those in peril on the sea. 

When they stopped broadcasting the Shipping Forecast at 5.50 pm each evening on the main radio station there was a (minor) outcry: programme planners said most of their audience had never been aboard a ship and had no idea what the words might mean; protestors said we were being denied our heritage if we didn’t hear those words recited: Forties, Tyne, Dogger. 

I think what they really thought was some Euro bogey man might come and build a Channel Tunnel, connecting us with The Continent and making us a Different Sort of People.

Once the Shipping Forecast has moved on from all the Rising and Falling more slowly, and the deeply inscrutable gales varying from 8 to 10, and the Unnamed that I have always taken to be visibility, moderate or poor, occasionally very poor, there’s the News Briefing followed by Prayer for Today.  No separation of church and state here, but now that we are all good friends together we have all sorts of prayers.  This morning it was Hindu, because October means Diwali.  

After Prayer for Today there’s Farming Today and that’s usually when I go back to sleep because there is not a lot in this world more soporific than GM modification, porcine husbandry, crop circles, mad cow disease, foot and mouth disease, or even (today’s story) the anti oxidant benefits of new fangled purple tomatoes.  

On a really bad night, however, I wake after we have invoked Almighty blessings on the Queen (last thing before BBC shutdown) and before that nice bucolic dawn comfort comes on, and then I have to listen to the hard stuff — World Service the sun never goes down on the empire instead of BBC we know you are sleepy. On the whole, I don’t like the World Service. Where the BBC is cosy and sedate, the World Service is shouty and insistent.  They have jingles.  They have accents  They have news from unfamiliar places.

This morning they had news form southeastern Congo and I stopped blowing my nose and listened.  The fighting has intensified there, and though it has not been reported on the main news anywhere I know, refugees are on the move.

I woke up because my daughter works in southwestern Uganda right over the border from the DRC and Rwanda.  She works with children maimed and blinded in the Rwanda genocide and with children orphaned by HIV/Aids, the scourge of the area. For awhile Uganda had the highest rate of Aids infection in the world. Some of the orphans probably have the disease too, and one of the things my daughter has been working towards is to get these kids tested so they can get the drugs they need.

When the fighting gets bad sometimes armed rebels cross the border, but mainly the only change is refugees fleeing the violence spilling over into her corner of Uganda.

She wrote to ask whether we had received news of the increased conflict. 

Doesn’t really affect us.  Just prices go up, can’t get milk, there are a lot of people selling stolen UN tents in the market, and every now and then we see big military tanks drive past the office.

Ah, just the every day inconveniences of living in a war zone.  I’ll be so glad when she is safely back on an island.

I haven’t quite come clean about my life in Oxford and have felt strangely reticent in writing about it.

I am, as I have passed myself off, a middle aged expatriot mostly living in England, but also a sometime escapee to a small island in west coast America where there are more Democrats and hippies than you can shake a stick at.

The thing I haven’t confessed to is that in the UK I partly live on a narrowboat, and, in so far as there’s a plan, that’s the plan. When I told my children I intended to sell up and buy a house boat my grown up, moved away son only laughed. My younger, off at college son replied (quite sensibly), But you don’t know anything about boats. My just finished college daughter said, That’s cool, can I have it when you die? And my fourteen year old asked, using the most censoriously clipped vowels her sweet, broad mouth could manage, Exactly how long do you intend to be homeless, Mother?

After that she, and perhaps her siblings too, wrote me off as an unreasonable parent. And why not write me off? Unlike any of the other mothers they know I have sat drinking cheap wine under a bridge and have kept warm by a fire of burning picnic tables.

I have also checked my make up in Her Majesty’s ladies room, because on two separate occasions the Master of the Household has received Her Majesty’s command to invite me to Buckingham Palace. — which means I have got on some ambassador’s list, and long may it be so.

A couple of days after shivering under the bridge while picnic tables burned I fastened a medal to the ample bosum of the representative of Court of St James’s branch of the DAR. Would you be eligible to join? she asked, haughtily and unwisely, breathing deeply as the pin hovered. I didn’t stab and I didn’t join.

My midlife crisis is called Pangolin. She’s 62 feet long, 6.5 feet wide, and illegally moored on the Oxford Canal. I’d be on her full time, except I can’t sell my house and am endlessly here dealing with the upkeep on a part 18th century mess (unless, as I have said before, you are buying, in which case Hedges is an unspoiled village period property with many charming, original features).

On the canal I have peace, though I have no electricity except what I generate with my diesel engine and I think hard about every amp I use. There is no water except what comes from a supply a day’s journey away. My neighbours have names like Ferret and Ratty, keep scary dogs and roll their own cigarettes. We meet in the nearby pub, enforce uneasy peace amongst our pets, get drunk, trade stories. In one way or another we are semi detached from ordinary British society. We are variously lame, divorced, sport shoulder to wrist tattoos, write books or play the violin. We live alone and don’t pay our TV license fee. For once I fit right in.

The Baby and I were talking about my father, her grandfather, whom she barely knows. I was trying to remember when she had last seen him, but she was very clear.

The last time I was there, she said emphatically, was when you went to the CIA by accident.

Right. I had almost forgotten that.

I had taken the two younger children, my son the Actor (then about 15) and the Baby (10), on holiday to the USA. Among other places, we went to my father’s house in northern Virginia, partly to visit with him, and partly so I could show these British children some of their American heritage.

One morning I borrowed my father’s car just to drive it as far as the underground – I guess it was about 20 minutes. I wanted to take the kids into Washington DC.

About five minutes down the road I remembered I did not have my driver’s license with me (in England you are not required to carry it when you drive, and because it is large and doesn’t easily fit into a wallet, I usually don’t).

Oh, don’t be silly, Mother, said the Actor. You are not going to get stopped!

A few minutes later I remembered I hadn’t brought the map either, but once again my son took charge. Not a problem, he said, I’ve memorised the directions.

So we carried on. I spent the day dragging the kids to every monument and memorial in the Capital. It was post 9/11. Visits to the White House were suspended and trips up the Washington Monument had to be pre-booked, but otherwise we saw and did pretty much everything a good tourist is meant to do: we trooped up the steps of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, wandered in the then fairly new sculpture garden at the Roosevelt Memorial, and walked sombrely past the names of the Vietnam dead (which I found deeply moving, and no doubt the children found dull, but they humoured me).

At the end of the day we rode the train back to Virginia and the Actor directed me as we picked up the car and headed toward my father’s house. We were nearly there when the Actor told me to take the next right.

Here? I asked.

I think so, he hesitated, and I turned. The sign, invisible from the main road, said, CIA. Authorized Personnel Only Past This Point.

Oops, said the Actor.

I looked around in a panic. The road was designed with a thick hedge of trees and bushes entirely separating the lane heading towards the CIA from the lane heading away. There were no turns to the right or left and no way to go back.

I had no choice except to carry on and eventually stop in front of a speaker on a post rather like the ones where you order at drive thrus. Only I didn’t think they would be selling me a latte. We were still a long way, I guessed, from any building.

A stern voice asked me to state my business with the CIA.

I said I didn’t have any business. I had taken a wrong turn and just wanted to get back on the main road.

The voice ordered me to continue forward into a parking area, stop in front of the chain link fence and follow the instructions of the officer.

I said, Please can’t I just turn around?

The voice bellowed, Follow the instructions of the officer!

I pulled in and parked.  Through the rear view window I saw a man in combat uniform sporting a machine gun almost as tall as he was saunter towards the car. I rolled down the window and waited for the inevitable question.

Can I see your driver’s license?

I explained that I came from England where it was not necessary to carry the license.

Okay, he said, Can I see your passport then?

I regretted that I did not have my passport with me.

He strolled around to the back of the car and examined the number plate. As he did so the Baby asked, in a whisper, What does the CIA do?

Without hesitation my son answered, They kill people.

The officer returned and said, in some exasperation, Well, can I see some kind of picture ID, please?

I said I thought I must have something… I shuffled wildly through my wallet and in a moment produced the only one with my photograph on it.

Reader, I handed the officer my Bodleian Library card.

A look of real sadness came over his face as he turned it from front to back. Ma’am, he said, I’m trying to help you here.

Well, anyway, things went from bad to worse and the officer pointed out I wasn’t giving him much to go on when I couldn’t find either the registration or insurance documents in the glove compartment. Nevertheless, he finally let us go after running the number plates to see if the address I gave him matched. You’ve got a couple of kids in the car, he said, by way of explanation, but I think it was the Bodley ID.

Back home, my father found the story hilarious. The turn towards his house is right after the CIA turn and it seems it wasn’t the first time that mistake had been made. His new house cleaner had also gone to the CIA by accident, only because she was Hispanic and driving an old beat up car, the disembodied voice directed her to pull into a spot where swords came out of the ground, surrounding the car and creating a cage. She was scared out of her wits. My father laughed until he cried as over and over he threw up his arms to demonstrate just how the swords had come up.

I guess, compared with your average encounter with the CIA, we came off pretty well.

The Baby and I spent a couple of days with Lawyer Sis, about two hours’ drive south, before Baby was due to join her beloved cousin, Buggy, Lawyer Sis’s middle child, in LA.

On the first evening we had barbeque on the deck. Lawyer Sis and Brother in Law are on a low carb diet, but they cheerfully provided everything required for anyone who still believed in sampling the major food groups. We all ate on paper plates.

After dinner we made popcorn in the microwave, climbed into the SUV and went to one of the last drive-ins left in the state. I hadn’t been to a drive-in movie for thirty years, and definitely not since they’ve abandoned those speakers on poles in favour of tuning in your radio. It was a lot warmer with the windows rolled up. The movie was dumb, but at a drive-in I guess the movie isn’t really the point.

The next morning Brother in Law put on a suit and went to work, while my sister, in her pajamas, fielded emails and phone calls from the office while entertaining me and coordinating her kids’ arrangements.

Late morning she drove me to the near-by holiday town where our brother bought an investment property a few years ago and has since then been in litigation with the former owners and the realtor. We got back around noon to find the Baby had just got up and was casually eating cereal out of a paper bowl. I had assumed the paper of the previous night was in honour of deck dining, but Baby, who makes herself at home here, knew it was the house norm.

In the afternoon we rode a ferry, bought a hostess gift for the Baby’s upcoming visit, reclaimed my youngest niece from her Greek grandmother, and smuggled my little dog under my sweatshirt into the ferry passenger cabin on the return ride, because it was way too cold to follow regulations and sit with him outside. Fellow travellers who spotted my subterfuge only smiled.

Home again, and very tired, we ate cold cuts off paper plates and cancelled the bowling alley we’d booked, though my energetic sister was keen to introduce me to “cosmic bowling”. I think that’s bowling with music and moving lights, but no doubt I’ll find out eventually.

Instead we turned on the Olympics, and as I watched the first American tele I have seen in many years, I was struck by the prescription drug ads. We have nothing like that in the UK and I wondered how British GPs would respond to the repeated suggestion “ask your doctor”. I was quite taken with the drug that stops you needing the loo when you’re on an outing and thought even Her Majesty could use that one (I once heard that royal protocol dictates she has to be within a hundred yards of one at all times). Alas the side effects, which apparently they are required to mention (they start speaking very fast at that point), make it sound not really worth it: among others, dry mouth, headache, stomach cramps, liver damage.

It turned out to be pretty much the same with all the drugs they were recommending. As soon as one looked like it would just fix me up there were threats of heart palpitations, strokes and dizzy spells, not to mention the assaults on my poor liver, already well dosed with red wine. Since they announced that women shouldn’t take the drug for reducing prostates I guess they are required to list all possible contraindications too.

Meanwhile the Lawyer Sis and Buggy’s father exchanged breezy emails about Baby’s travel arrangements.

Now I know it is not polite to make fun of someone who has invited your sixteen year old daughter to be a houseguest for a whole week, but I’m making an exception, not just because his name is St John (pronounced, quite correctly, Sin Jin – and trust one of us to find the only guy this side of Jane Eyre called that), but because he denied his child until the Lawyer Sis slapped a paternity suit on him. (And when I tell you that in divorcing the father of her first child she got him excommunicated for good measure, you probably won’t be messing with her.)

Baby thought St John’s (Sin Jin’s) email about her upcoming visit was very funny:

Our place is an old Spanish house built up in the hills with a great view. It’s hot in Los Angeles and we have palm trees everywhere, so you’ll get to wear sunglasses and a cute dress when we head out to explore Hollywood. Don’t have sunglasses or a cute dress? Save your pennies and we’ll take you shopping. Vicki knows all the best places, whether you like the latest thing or really old grungy stuff. You’ll live like a rock star for a week! Well, maybe like a back-up singer anyway.

The next day we were up early to dodge the Saturday traffic. In the ferry line my sister and my daughter applied their make up. I felt a little underdressed next to them and fumbled in my bag to see if I had remembered the lip coloured, almost invisible, lipstick I sometimes wear. Nope. As usual I had forgotten it.

By the time we got to the airport Baby had all her gels, blushes, lotions and creams packed into a clear plastic bag, her British passport stowed and her American one ready to display for a picture ID and a note of her booking reference for her e ticket. Once again I was impressed with the poise and maturity of a child only just sixteen who travels all by herself so easily across oceans and continents.

We left her in the security line. She was in LA, almost a thousand miles south, long before her aunt and I, fighting Seattle traffic, were home.

Two of my four children, oldest and youngest, are coming tonight.  Back in England, when they came home I really did do something akin to preparing a feast worthy of any number of prodigals.  And if I didn’t exactly kill a calf, I practically bought a cow, since the girls are inclined to drink at least six pints of milk a day. (That’s British pints – 20 ounces each.)

Here, I reckon there is nearly a whole calf in the freezer anyway, and I didn’t shop.  I’ve got a handful of excuses: the car is out of petrol, with just enough to make it off the island and to the station if I don’t get lost, and I am bound to get lost.  But the real reason is I can’t remember what my children eat.

In the days when one or the other of them needed new shoes every few months (which I recently worked out went on for about 25 years, at at least 30 quid a throw) I would take them to a very posh, old fashioned, scoldy, shoe shop.  It was the only one in Oxford where I could buy their shoes, because they had freakishly thin feet (I don’t know, maybe it was from being half American).  The shoe fitter would say, What size is your child wearing now?  And I would look sort of dumb and peer hopelessly inside their shoes at the rubbed out place where the size used to be printed and confess I didn’t know.  Then she would glare at me as if to say, What kind of Bad Mother doesn’t know what size shoes her children wear?  (That would be me.)

What I do know is they won’t eat the same food.  Two of my children eat little or no meat and two of them eat mainly meat (although one apparently has a programme for giving up meat and I’m damned if I know where he is on the timetable).  At least one won’t eat pasta but likes rice, and one eats mainly pasta, but never, ever rice.  I think some of them sometimes eat potatoes, but frankly I haven’t a clue which ones.  And now Silverbridge (oldest, natch) has a lovely new wife who, as far as I can make out, eats absolutely nothing.  The Lawyer Sis is coming too, but she’s easy because she mostly eats mayonnaise.

The Baby is flying in from England, and I haven’t seen her since mid April (what kind of Bad Mother abandons a child who is barely sixteen and buggers of to an island thousands of miles away just because she takes her midlife crises really seriously?  That would be me.)  Silverbridge and his wife, who have just moved from Las Vegas to Seattle, will pick her up at the airport and bring her here. 

And then what kind of Bad Mother would so indulge and spoil her children that she will cook up separate meals for each, exactly to order, and wait on them hand and foot? 

That will be me.

And I don’t sleep in tents, were the words of my ex when I suggested, many years ago, that we take the kids camping.  So, though I camped some when I was a child, and a lot when I was a young woman, I didn’t at all while I was married.  After my ex and I separated I bought a couple of tents and for a few years took my youngest, with half a dozen or so other little girls, to a campground about five miles from home where we made makeshift somemores out of chocolate digestive biscuits and raspberry flavoured (because that’s all I could find) marshmallows. 

My daughter lost interest when she was about 11 and I hadn’t been in a tent since then when I got a call late morning on Saturday from the hippies on the Extremely Small Island.  There would be transport for me if I was waiting by the “marina” at noon.  I rummaged about until I found my mother’s tent, bedroll and sleeping bag, and threw together a few clothes.  I also grabbed a random, and largely inappropriate, stash of food.

The marina is really just a narrow rocky beach with a boat ramp, right before the spot where an ugly seawall inadequately protects a partially washed away road.  As I stood by the roadside with all my stuff – which the Americans elevated to “gear” and which I finally remembered the Brits would have called “kit” – a pick up cruised by, stopped, and reversed back to me.  Dancing Man leaned out of the window and chatted me up while I scanned the horizon for my ship coming in.

Meanwhile several teenagers and a couple of engaging eleven year olds, who I realised were to be my fellow travellers, arrived with their gear.  We all watched as finally the boat pulled in and tied off on the mooring 50 yards or so offshore.

It took a couple of journeys rowing back and forth to the sail boat before we were all loaded and headed for the Extremely Small Island under power of a put put motor, since we were too many to sail. 

Twenty minutes later we rowed ashore to find an impressive camp already set on the beach, with a large, communal kitchen tent draped over the picnic table next to the fire pit.  Strung along the beach was a row of other tents, and finding a vacant spot I pitched mine.

My orientation consisted of the question, Did you bring wine? (yes) and a guided tour to the pit toilets.  

The children (all boys) wandered off and the grownups drank and ate guacamole (good call my bringing that).  After awhile the four womenfolk set off in search of the kids.  Just one of us was mother to any of them, but we all understood her anxiety.  At high tide only part of the shore is accessible, and we quickly covered it.  Back at camp the mother became really worried.  Two years earlier, apparently, the kids, clinging to cliffs as the tide came in, had to be rescued by boat.  None of the rest of us thought they would do it twice, but the mother was insistent and a search boat went out. 

Not long afterwards, a group of very wet children, rescued for the second time, shivered by the fire and slowly burnt the rubber of their drying shoes.  The teenagers sullenly blamed it on the overweight eleven year old who had been found clinging to a particularly precarious spot on the cliff side.  If it hadn’t been for him, they said, they would have made it.  There were minor skirmishes between the teenagers and the drunker grownups.  I had never met most of the men and noted that they, and the children, had curious first names: Kent, Solomon, Titus, Keenan, Egerton. 

After awhile I worked out that a communal kitchen didn’t mean there would be any communal dinner or anyone taking charge of the fire, except to keep it topped with driftwood.  I monitored smouldering shoes, drank wine and ate tortilla chips.  I felt alone, but this time I didn’t feel strange and I didn’t feel sorry for myself. 

The tide continued to rise and one by one we drifted off to our tents, except for a young man who stretched out on the picnic bench and tried to sleep until dozens of field mice, waiting for quiet, ran all over him.

The next morning the party began to break up.  Guys remembered they had to be somewhere that day and teenagers had work to go to.  By late afternoon it was only the mother, her eleven year old son, a friend of his, and I who were left.  As he departed, her husband promised to come back to fetch us the next day. 

The kids paddled about in a canoe, and the mother and I walked and panicked when, briefly, we lost my little dog.  We watched eagles watching us from the top of tall pines and hoped they didn’t fancy poodle for dinner.

The four of us (and the dog, phew) ate together beside the fire and the kids made somemores of the genuine variety.  We competed for the perfect toasted marshmallow while the fire slowly burned low.  As the tide came in a tug boat with lighted mast pulled an enormous tanker through the strait.  One of the kids said, sticking his marshmallow into the embers, It’s so nice to be here, with no one getting drunk.

I woke before dawn to the sound of another tug.  We breakfasted on what food was still left, rationed our water a little, and lolled in the sunshine.  I had forgotten the two things I love most about camping – the sheer grubbiness of it and the sitting around doing nothing, getting just enough too much sun to make you sleepy.  Along with my standards of cleanliness, my literary tastes plummet.  I happily read a really lousy thriller – it might be the first thriller I have read since a camping trip in the Sierra Nevada in the seventies when The Onion Field (a good thriller, as I recall) gripped me.

We broke camp sadly, watching our pick up boat slowly drawing closer.  The kids rowed back and forth with the gear, and as they returned for a final trip were swamped by the wake of yet another tanker.  We baled the canoe with plastic food tubs leftover from camping feasts, climbed in with the wet children, and paddled one last time to the boat that sailed us to the world of running water, real beds and email.

I want to go back!

Wimbledon started today without me.  I wasn’t sure it could do that. 

My mother says her tele doesn’t get sports channels (so I won’t break my no TV since 17 April record).  The BBC has a player that allows you to watch it through your computer but only if you are in the UK, and it seems to know I am not – which makes it a lot smarter than Google or Match.com, because no matter how hard I try I can’t convince either of them that I have moved 8000 miles.

At home, Wimbledon fortnight was the only time of the year when I managed to seize control of the television: kids always cave in when they know you are implacable.  At work I would cheer for afternoon rain (because then I might get a chance to see some of the biggest match), then race home, mix a gin and tonic and paint my toes in between points.  No one was getting dinner until doubles came on.

The children just about fitted in with this deprivation.  Anyway, it’s more or less obligatory for Brits to be passionate about Wimbledon – the BBC devotes 50% of its afternoon and evening air time for the whole two weeks to cover it.  My youngest took her patriotic duty seriously, although, as ever, she had her limits.  When she was three and a bit she informed me as she watched a particularly energetic match that when she grew up and played tennis she was never, ever going to play with – I cannot now remember whom, but my sons will – Pat Rafferty?  She said, “I’m going to refuse to play with him, mummy, because he smells.  I can smell the smell of him right through the tele.” 

I’m not, on the whole, very interested in sport, though I did get a bit worked up about cricket a couple of years ago when we won the Ashes, and, according to some, cricket is also an important test of patriotism.  About a decade earlier, when I found myself rooting for the home team against the Yank in a Davis Cup tie, I realised with surprise that I had become at least a little bit Brit.

I never watched tennis at all before I went to the UK.  But, from my first summer, I was fascinated by the Englishness of Wimbledon.  Players in regulation white competing on manicured green courts in between hours of rain delays which the commentators filled in with chit chat about strawberries and cream and who was in the Royal Box, and, whenever there was any tennis played, charming understatement from genteel commentators with perfect, now very old fashioned, RP.  I never went to Wimbledon, but it was great fun watching it in the graduate common room at college on the summer afternoons and evenings of the Long Vac.

But I really fell in love with tennis when my first baby was only a few weeks old and England was having a heat wave.  For days the baby was dressed only in a tiny nappy (cloth!), and, not wearing a lot more myself, I lolled skin to skin with him in the “master” bedroom – so small you couldn’t walk all the way around the bed – in my little British house.  On the black and white tele, with a dial you had to tune like a radio, fuzzy athletes darted around the grey court – in real life it was toasted brown.  My son and I dozed off to the thwap, thwap of the ball back and forth, back and forth, he waking to suckle just a little when the applause was particularly loud, and me to smile as I heard again, “Oh, well played!”

But here’s my elder daughter.

When I first saw the picture I didn’t really take it in. I looked past the man to my daughter. I recognized the pose, hands on hips and the tilt of the head, and I thought, oh dear. What’s that child so angry at now?

And then I looked more closely and saw the gun.