“Cutting it a bit fine” the guard glowered at us as we sprinted our bikes to the front carriage. She was in no mood to help me as I struggled to lift my bike onto the rack.

Andrew had greeted us that morning with two overflowing glasses of freshly pulveriaed wheatgrass and ginger tonic, “I couldn’t let you go without a detox”. My throat still burned and eyes still watered with “health”. As with all goodbyes, it’s hard not to linger, Iris gleefully parroted “goodbye Jo, goodbye Dylan”  waving us all the way down the driveway, a beautiful family portrait that disappeared as we crunched down the drive. We were lucky with two connections to make we had made it with seconds to spare.

The second train ride we spent next to a couple doing identical crosswords on their ipads, the gentleman was inordinately excited at the size of his bag of crisps “they’ll last us all week!”. We passed through a rain storm, the other side was summer. In the building heat we just stood, starring at a guide dog happily sprawled across the floor.

Then there was Cambridge. Sunny streets, with bikes piled against every fence and lampost, carelessly locked by the wheel if that. It was all rather lively with rambling roses on brick walls and red geraniums in window boxes.

We met the nanny first, she jovially informed us the kids would be heartbroken if they didn’t get to show us our room in the attic so we took a walk through the university and witnessed a punter disembarking his vessel in the middle of the river and being hauled back in by merry comrades, exams were over.

We returned to meet the three kids and the babysitter. They seemed less interested in showing us our room than advertised, but began warming up to us pretty rapidly. It was funny to be in someone’s home you have never met, making yourself comfortable while they are absent. With the whole confusing family tree on Dylan’s side, we later all agreed it was easier if we were labelled ‘australian relatives’; we had a nap to keep out of the way. When we met Hil and Nick we got on like a house on fire and as a bonus they made us tea, we’d fallen on our feet again.

Across the world and the first plant we saw at the entrance to the Edinburgh Botanic Gardens was a Woolemi Pine, the Australian Christmas tree, that was only discovered in 1994 in the Blue Mountains’ wilderness (the world still holds some secrets you see).

A beautiful sunny day that was meant for relaxing in the sun with daisychains as the only challenge. So we did exactly that, the lawn slightly damp with last night’s dew. I didn’t notice but Dylan did that every woman who passed us smiled with pleasure at my simple garlands, it’s so nice to share in the simple joys of summer with strangers.