The physical landscape of trees and fields and hedges with their interruption of stone cottages is wrapped in a soft grey mist. This is autumn now, with the hues changing from bright to muted green, curled brown leaves lying on the grass. It takes a long time to write a book, all the time from spring to autumn and then the whole of another year’s seasons. Outside the window, beyond the space where I write, bright bursts of lime green, chrome yellow and a dark-bright red interrupt the message of decline and disappearance. Ambiguity and ambivalence are part of nature. There are purple sloes still in the hedgerows and fat blackberries high up where no one can reach them. My magic apple tree throws its fruit casually, in abundance, on the ground. The green globes lie in the wet grass. If I don’t shift them, they decay into it, transforming themselves into dark brown crystallised balls. Nature is profligate and self-indulgent. When I walked out there this morning, I saw that several crops of mahogany fungi had appeared on the lawn overnight. They look most appealing as breakfast food, fried in a little butter, but I know better than that. If I had my life over again I’d learn the safe way to pick mushrooms.

If I had my life over again, I’d be much more mindful of the lives around me, open to the meanings that stretch across the permeable barrier between the public and the private. If I had my life again I’d talk to Richard Titmuss and his wife about what drove them really, and why they had a child and how they turned her into me. I’d sit down with Kay Titmuss and her husband and ask them gently why she seemed so unhappy and why he seemed to have such difficulty with the idea of women as equal human beings. It’s because we ‘know’ marriage and family life too well that we know particular marriages and family lives not at all: they hide so successfully under the enormous cloak of brand image.

To the side of the inviting fungi sprouting on the lawn is Vera’s rose. It’s a Charles de Mills rose, a spectacular old variety with deep crimson blooms containing delicate tessellations like petticoats.