A fairly uneventful drive in late summer sunshine down to southwest London to stay with friends. Dinner on Friday evening was in a local French restaurant and after a cooked breakfast provided by our host we all had went to Kew Gardens. I don’t think I have been there at this time of year before and cannot remember such a warm September. There were many new things to see and taking a note of Nasreen Mohamedi’s close-up paintings of sections of buildings, I took some photographs of parts of plants. We climbed to the top of the Treetop Walkway and enjoyed being among the tops of the trees.

Cricket was being played on Kew Green when we left the gardens, a very English sight. After a drink in the local pub we took a bus to Richmond for a pre-theatre dinner and then saw The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd by DH Lawrence at the Orange Tree Theatre which is in the round. I have read Lawrence’s novels and poetry but was not familiar with this play. The gas lamp and furniture of the set and the East Midlands accents took me right back to my great aunt’s house and there was even a reference to Old Brinsley Pit, near where we lived and only a couple of miles from where Lawrence was born. The first half of the play kept us enthralled but the second act petered out at the end leaving us feeling something else should have happened. Anyway, we took a taxi back to a pub which had live music and ended the evening there. On Sunday, before leaving, we visited Richmond Park. We had coffee on the terrace at Pembroke Lodge, watching some jackdaws searching for food that had fallen on the ground and then walked around the area, admiring the views and the forest.

All too soon we had to get back for lunch and then back up the motorway with the temperature still in the mid twenties centigrade.