Whew! It’s been six months and four days since Avery began her odyssey through King’s Col­lege Prepara­tory School, and we are all ready, I can safely say, for vaca­tion. Home­work, skat­ing, swim­ming, bal­let, hand­writ­ing, pack­ing and unpack­ing the ruck­sack, do you have your ten­nis racket, drama club and LUNCH. No doubt by Sep­tem­ber she’ll be rar­ing to go again, but right now she’s rel­ish­ing choos­ing her own clothes every day, play­ing with Lucky, her new Build-a-Bear, and pack­ing those essen­tial items with­out which her sum­mer in Con­necti­cut will suf­fer. It’s a mot­ley assort­ment: a book on horse­back rid­ing with her beloved trainer Joey’s pic­ture in it, most excit­ing, her flute, an assort­ment of cloth­ing that hasn’t been worn since last sum­mer, and all her fancy dress items for the Hamp­tons Clas­sic. I must begin pack­ing as well, although I con­fess to a sort of “what the hell” atti­tude toward it, as in why not just take a carry-on with a tooth­brush and see what I find at Red Gate Farm? Plus Avery has out­grown nearly every­thing she owns that has a waist­band or cuffs, so a major shop­ping trip is prob­a­bly in the off­ing when we get back. I might as well do the same.

I’m also leaf­ing through my cat­a­logue of CityLit courses for Sep­tem­ber, since reg­is­tra­tion is this week. Shall I take “Writ­ing for Chil­dren,” or “Screen­plays 101,” or “Auto­bi­og­ra­phy Into Fic­tion”? Or maybe more than one, why not. Spareribs mar­i­nated in my own spe­cial secret mix­ture are siz­zling in the oven, and I think we’ll pack our pic­nic bas­ket and have din­ner in Hyde Park, unless there is some mind-bendingly thumpy pub­lic con­cert going on. No one warned us about the dark under­belly of liv­ing adja­cent to the park. It is really loud, when it is. Dun­raven Street is a haven of peace, but even its gen­tle envi­rons are pierced by the sheer deci­bel level of some of the bands that play. Oh no, I sound like a lit­tle old lady.

The last day of school was quite touch­ing for Avery. I arrived at school to pick her up at noon, along with Anna and Ellie to give Becky some breath­ing room to pack for Scot­land. I was chat­ting with my friend Angela when she sud­denly said, “Avery’s at the head of the group in the door­way, in floods of tears [one of my favorite Eng­lish expres­sions]. You had bet­ter go see what’s hap­pen­ing.” And sure enough, there she was with her lit­tle pink cheeks and teary eyes, clutch­ing all her belong­ings and look­ing quite for­lorn. “What’s wrong, what’s hap­pened?” I asked in some alarm. “It was a really SEN­TI­MEN­TAL last assem­bly!” she qua­vered. “Form Six are really, truly gone.” Poor dear. All the other moth­ers and the teach­ers were look­ing on in sym­pa­thy. “Per­haps it’s the heat,” Mrs Davies sug­gested. “No, she’s just feel­ing sen­ti­men­tal about Edwina and her other Form Six friends leav­ing,” I assured her. “Well, in my opin­ion the assem­bly was not quite the dis­play of mawk­ish­ness that we have seen in years past,” the lady men­tioned darkly, and retreated into the school. Poor lady, can you imag­ine what her life has been like the past few weeks? All those cups to engrave, all those wounded egos to salve when not every­one can be Joseph in the play, all the report cards to sign with “Well done!”

I gath­ered up the girls and we headed to Nando’s in Baker Street for a lit­tle rotis­serie chicken and air con­di­tion­ing, where I pro­ceeded to blow my head off with spicy chicken wings. Ellie in par­tic­u­lar watched with glee to see my head actu­ally blow off and was quite dis­ap­pointed to find it was merely a fig­ure of speech. “But it could PARTLY blow off, which would still be fun,” she sug­gested. We all looked over report cards, and I’m happy to kvell a bit and say that she just did mar­velously. And it was quite a col­lec­tion of doc­u­ments, that report card. Accus­tomed as we are to the rather more min­i­mal efforts of PS 234, as devoted as they were, the eight or so pages were rather intim­i­dat­ing! “Wow, the folder isn’t blue or green, it’s turquoise!” Avery mar­velled. And with her name printed on the front and every­thing. All the teach­ers remarked on how won­der­fully she had done with merely half a year. Good on you, Avery.

We’re now about to watch a hilar­i­ous pro­gramme on the BBC called “Only Fools On Horses,” a char­ity deal wherein minor celebri­ties raise money by rid­ing and jump­ing, when most of them aren’t any good. It will run for seven nights. Hard to believe that on night five, we’ll be in Connecticut…

Boy did we have fun at Wim­ble­don! Way more than I expected. My sin­gle expe­ri­ence with the ten­nis in the past was way back in… gosh, was it 1991? That year, there was so much rain in the first week that Mid­dle Sun­day, always play­less until then, had to be called up to acco­mo­date all the delayed matches. And since there had been no advance ticket sales, since that day had never been open for play before, the powers-that-be at Wim­ble­don decided to let the masses take con­trol. First come, first serve, in PER­SON! So John and I gath­ered up our waxed cot­ton coats, and blan­kets and what­ever else, don’t even remem­ber, and slept out on the pave­ments all night, wait­ing for dawn. As I remem­ber it, we had a great time! There are some very scary pho­tos of us to prove that sleep­ing rough is not a way to look your best the next day. But we didn’t care. We trooped in, and it was a blast. Our crowd, on Cen­tre Court that day, brought The Wave to Wim­ble­don! Until then, and since, such a breach of eti­quette and Stiff Upper Lip would never have occurred. Such fun.

It was quite a dif­fer­ent story this year. I showed up in a lit­tle black sheath dress and the beau­ti­ful Fer­rag­amo scarf John’s mom brought me from Flo­rence, and John was in white shirt and linen khakis. We headed for the Debenture’s Lounge, where cor­po­rate spon­sors and their clients can hang out, and met up with John’s work col­league Ed and his drop-dead gor­geous new wife Trupti, for lunch at win­dows over­look­ing Court 17. Lovely rose wine, lan­goustines and avo­cado with marie rose sauce, smoked salmon. Yum. Then down to Court One, where two play­ers we had never heard of were listed, just by their first ini­tials and last names. “Now how to we decide who to root for?” I asked. “Not even know­ing their first names. It’s rather ran­dom.” “Oh no,” said Trupti, “You see who has the bet­ter bum, and that’s who you go for. It’s easy.” So we decided that Ran­dom Czech Who­ever had a bet­ter bum, con­sign­ing his Ran­dom Swedish Oppo­nent to ignominy, and the match was on. Unfor­tu­nately for court man­ners, Trupti and I (and sev­eral hun­dred other peo­ple) found much more inter­est­ing things to focus on than the match, like how she and Ed met, and her Indian her­itage, and of course Avery’s win­ning the Latin cup. The ref­eree had to shush us, so we calmed down and decided really to get behind our Ran­dom Player and show our support.

When play was dull, I pelted Trupti with ques­tions about proper Eng­lish. She and Eddie speak quite the most per­fect plushy ver­sion of the lan­guage, with all the most ele­gant phrases and responses to queries. “Pre­cisely!” and “Yes, very much so indeed.” I would love noth­ing more than to have been born such an ele­gant per­son. “How bad is it these days to say ‘bloody’?” I asked. “Oh, not bad at all, it’s quite the done thing,” she assured me. “There are far worse. Things I am afraid to say I said dur­ing the Por­tu­gal match, in front of my mother! In quite a fam­ily envi­ron­ment.” Of course I can­not print them here. And then there is “chap” ver­sus “bloke,” and it seemed that “chap” was rather more for­mal, where “bloke” is chummy. I should fol­low in Avery’s foot­steps and read the won­der­ful book I gave her, “Watch­ing the Eng­lish,” which explains all the lit­tle intri­ca­cies of the class sys­tem, the way dif­fer­ent words for dif­fer­ent things are used by the var­i­ous classes. For instance, who says “lav,” who says “loo,” who says “toi­let,” who says “ladies”? We’ll have to read it to find out. Or ask Avery.

There was a rain delay con­ve­niently just at teatime, so as the ball boys ran to cover the grass with the pre­cise and per­fect rolled-up cover, we retreated into the lounge again for pep­per­mint tea, egg and cress sand­wiches, and straw­ber­ries. Just as we fin­ished eat­ing, play was back on! Perfect.

Well, as the hours and sets went by we got more and more enam­ored of our Player. Finally, frus­trated by cheer­ing on some­one about whom we knew noth­ing, we got Eddie to look him up on his Black­berry, thereby reveal­ing that his name was Radek Stepanek, and of course we knew he was Czech. By that time we could iden­tify all his tricks, his weak points, like approach­ing the net and try­ing to hit the ball back with­out let­ting it touch the ground. “No, Rad, no! You know what hap­pens when you do that!” Finally Trupti said, “I’ve got to get down there and talk to the man. He’s los­ing my loy­alty.” The match went on and on, into the fourth set, with even tie-breakers being tied. The sun sank below the top of the sta­dium, reveal­ing a per­fect sum­mer evening sky, and it even got a bit chilly. At long last the Swedish player, Bjork­man, broke our boy Radek. He was quite cute in win­ning, hug­ging him­self and danc­ing a lit­tle jig. Since then I’ve dis­cov­ered he was the old­est player in the sin­gles tour­na­ment. I think we backed the wrong dude. Although as John pointed out, I think I enjoy watch­ing the lit­tle ball boys and girls as much as the play­ers. They are so earnest! Hands behind backs, lit­tle white sneak­ers planted pre­cisely hip width apart, ball in hand shoot­ing up in the air, vir­tu­ally beg­ging the player, “Choose this one, choose this one!” Funny story: this year Ralph Lau­ren was awarded the cov­eted task of dress­ing all the ball kids and lines­peo­ple and judges. Cer­tainly they look very swank, in cream trousers, blue jack­ets piped in cream, the whole nine yards. Except that on the first day of play, 60% of the line judges needed repairs as their trouser seams burst! And there was only an hour of play. Got to get bet­ter sweat­shops, Ralph, how embarrassing.

We headed off back toward Lon­don in Eddie and Trupti’s dar­ling lit­tle black Mini con­vert­ible, or “cabri­o­let” as John insisted on show­ing off. I would dearly love to have that car. They dropped us at Vaux­hall Sta­tion and purred off. We had arranged for Avery to stay the night at Anna’s (poor Becky, although appar­ently her chil­dren get up eas­ier in the morn­ing when Avery’s there to enter­tain!), and so came home in the soft twi­light, feel­ing that we need to do things like that more often. A Day Out, as they say here in our adopted land.

Before I get to what’s shown in these pho­tos, I’ll tell you what times we are hav­ing, these last hec­tic days in Lon­don before the end of school and time to whisk our­selves off to Con­necti­cut for the sum­mer. Hav­ing school last until the sec­ond week in July cer­tainly does alter one’s per­cep­tion of sum­mer: it’s here, and yet it isn’t.

For exam­ple, our ver­sion of the Fourth of July was rather muted. John went to work, Avery went to school, I guess I cleaned the lit­ter­box or some such thing, and hung around killing time with house­hold chores. Finally we got an email invit­ing us to a bar­be­cue at the Smiths’, hooray! As always hap­pens in such sit­u­a­tions, I decided to take potato salad to them and imme­di­ately the day turned from bor­ing and slow to a race against the clock to gro­cery shop, boil pota­toes, chop herbs, mix dress­ing and assem­ble, all in this awful heat wave we’ve been hav­ing. Try boil­ing pota­toes and then hav­ing to cut them up, in a kitchen with­out air con­di­tion­ing in 90-degree heat! I felt like a pio­neer woman in Kansas. But it turned out per­fectly, if you’d like to try it. Boil pota­toes as usual and cut in bite-size pieces. Then chop finely hand­fuls of chives, lemon thyme, dill and pars­ley, as well as a red onion. Mix equal parts may­on­naise and sour cream with the juice of a lemon and its zest, salt and pep­per. Toss all this together and chill. The potato salad, I mean, not you (although that would be good too).

A rush to pack the salad in a cool bag, wash my hair and face and sling Avery’s ice skates over my shoul­der, and off to the rink to meet her class for the last day of skat­ing, waah! Always such fun to watch their lit­tle selves and gos­sip with Angelica’s nanny and Coco’s mum. All over until next year.

I decided that with potato salad, a bag of lit­tle cans of that Marks and Spencers gin and ton­ics I was wax­ing lyri­cal about recently, a back­pack, a gym bag, skates and hand­bag, I was unequal to the task of find­ing the proper bus, so we splurged on a taxi and arrived at the Smiths’ to find Emily clos­eted with some extremely impor­tant Russ­ian art his­to­rian, unex­pect­edly, so I dropped Avery and the food off with the kids, and Mick and I went up to Blenheim Books in Blenheim Cres­cent, to find birth­day presents: his for an Eton mate and mine for Anna’s lit­tle sis­ter Ellie. Only in such a charm­ing shop might one be able to sat­isfy both require­ments! I bought “Tim in Dan­ger” for her, a fan­tas­tic book from the 1940s in a series by Edward Ardiz­zone, known mainly for his illus­tra­tions, but the “Tim” books are com­pletely charm­ing. For some fan­tas­ti­cal rea­son, lit­tle boy Tim has con­vinced his par­ents that if does well in his schools, a proper reward would be to let him hire him­self out as a mer­chant marine on the high seas. Nat­u­rally! They’re just won­der­ful sto­ries. Of course I came across one old copy of “Tim and Char­lotte” when Avery was tiny, and found that they were all out of print, so I labo­ri­ously tracked down vin­tage copies from all over the globe, of the whole series. Where­upon the pub­lisher promptly decided to reis­sue them all. Darn! Mick found a par­tic­u­larly win­some cook­book and a tempt­ing novel for his friend’s birth­day party, and we walked home in the intense late after­noon heat, dis­cussing his plans for his first year at Har­vard in Sep­tem­ber, how to ship 300 books to school and still have money for tuition, his spe­cial­iza­tion in Mid­dle East­ern lan­guages. With this area of inter­est, and his par­ents both ex-Marines, John has imme­di­ately con­cluded that he will become a spook. Cool, my own Tom Quinn!

A very nice evening. We stag­gered home very late, and did not really get enough sleep for the big day that was to fol­low: Prize Day! Now, every­one in Avery’s class had been warn­ing her in the nicest pos­si­ble way not to expect a prize, because she had been in the school only half a year. Fair enough. Under­promise, overde­liver, as John used to say (gen­er­ally in terms of when he was com­ing home from a busi­ness trip). We all got dressed up and went to the Royal Insti­tute of British Archi­tects, and chat­ted in the lobby wait­ing to be sum­moned into the enor­mous Great Hall. Such excite­ment when the gulls came in from their walk across the street, all scrubbed and shin­ing and excited to get their prizes. We were given a pro­gram, which all the Eng­lish par­ents knew listed the prize win­ners, but we didn’t, typ­i­cal Amer­i­can dodos, so we didn’t even look at it, just kept talk­ing to friends, until sev­eral peo­ple said, “Avery won the Latin Prize,” and “Avery won the Howard de Walden essay prize, third place!” Howard de Walden was the orig­i­nal owner of all the land that is Maryle­bone, and his estate still con­trols the daily run­ning of the neigh­bor­hood, as the Grosvenor Estates con­trols May­fair. There, I’ve pro­vided my lit­tle Lon­don edu­ca­tional tit­bit for the day. Back to the really impor­tant stuff: she really did win! A sil­ver cup with “Latin” on one side and the names of all the past win­ners, with her name and the date on the other! She gets to keep it for a year, and then gives it back for next year’s winner.

We all filed in and sat down and tried to behave our­selves under the cen­so­ri­ous eyes of not only Mrs D, but the Chair of the Man­agers of the school over­all, built like the bow of a ship and just about as warm and fuzzy. Until she gave her very funny, very wise speech, that is.

A very odd, appar­ently porno­graphic writer was the prize pre­sen­ter! It’s tra­di­tional for the school to com­mis­sion a minor celebrity par­ent to offi­ci­ate, but hello, erot­ica? Well, all right. She was a Miss Kathy Lette, and I must say she was funny, if not quite the role model one would expect the school to choose: she con­fessed to never hav­ing been to a Prize Day before, and to hav­ing left school at age 15, “so I’m an auto­di­dact, which means self-taught, and lets any­body else off the hook.” Mrs D made the Annual School Report, which detailed the many cur­ricu­lum points the chil­dren study, the new librar­ian to begin in Sep­tem­ber, the big changes in school life since they acquired the build­ing adja­cent and allowed them to accept more pupils (like Avery! thank you, Mrs D). Then it was prize time. There were dozens of sil­ver cups and salvers and plat­ters lined up on the long table, and Mrs C presided in a sort of ner­vous way, try­ing des­per­ately to give the right thing to the right gull. Avery did not find out she won any­thing until she and the other Form Four win­ners were plucked from their seats, and even then she didn’t know what she had won until she heard Mrs D announce it! Her lit­tle smile just went from ear to ear. All the par­ents in our row were so very gra­cious and pleased for us, the New Family.

Com­ing as we do from the Amer­i­can school of “no one is bet­ter than any­one else,” in which sin­gling out is a crime pun­ish­able by death, it was very hard to get used to the idea that right out in pub­lic, announced with a micro­phone, chil­dren could be dif­fer­en­ti­ated from one another. Sev­eral oth­ers of Avery’s class­mates received two awards, and many received none at all. Amaz­ing. Of course I don’t know how we would be feel­ing about all this if she hadn’t received a prize. I sup­pose it would have to be taken as an oppor­tu­nity to encour­age the child for next year, which could work if you said exactly the right thing. But in any case, that is the sys­tem here. Of course Becky’s elder daugh­ter Ash­ley looked back in our direc­tion in time to see me all teary-eyed, very embar­rass­ing! I couldn’t help it. It seemed an incred­i­bly touch­ing, reward­ing event, to cel­e­brate how hard every­one, includ­ing the teach­ers and staff, have worked all year. We are so proud of her.

Pro­fes­sor S’s speech was very inter­est­ing, focus­ing as she did on the impor­tance of con­tribut­ing to the greater good. She said sternly, “Hold up the index fin­ger of your right hand and place it on your chest. Good. Now say to your­self, ‘this is ME.’ And as you’re say­ing that, and think­ing about the Big You, realise that aside from the peo­ple in this room, very few peo­ple in the world care, or know, about the Big You. They’re think­ing of the Big Me them­selves, and most of them do not come from the advan­tages that you gulls have. It is your respon­si­bil­ity to take what you have been given, and think about what con­tri­bu­tion you can make in the Great World.” Very inter­est­ing, con­sid­er­ing that the rest of the day had been very much about back-patting, prais­ing, giv­ing to them. It is dif­fi­cult some­times to know how to tem­per all the giv­ing that our child expe­ri­ences, with some lim­its, and some sense of her place in the greater scheme of things. Of course it’s won­der­ful to give to her, not just things but atten­tion, and approval. But how to mod­er­ate her per­cep­tion that the rest of the world, and the rest of her life, will treat her that way. It can be a quandary.

But we didn’t have much time to pon­der these large ques­tions, or to enjoy the tri­umph, because Wim­ble­don beck­oned! So I put Avery into Becky’s hands, the poor thing off to organ­ise her youngest daugh­ter Ellie’s birth­day party, so of course what she needed most was an extra child. It bears say­ing again: Becky is a saint. We headed off in the most expen­sive cab ride of my life, to the ten­nis. Traf­fic was under­stand­ably hor­ren­dous, but for some rea­son we just sat back and chat­ted and didn’t obsess over the rapidly mount­ing fare. As we arrived, it was clear that the skies could open at any moment, but noth­ing could dampen our spirits.

More about Wim­ble­don later, but right now must go col­lect Avery from her friend Sophia’s birth­day party, at a place called “Build a Bear,” which is, accord­ing to Avery, a ver­i­ta­ble Shangri-la of child­hood. I think the par­ents who do such a birth­day party deserve medals, because it must be more than slightly ener­vat­ing to take a large group of lit­tle girls to choose flat bears, put them through the stuff­ing machine (includ­ing a real plush heart of the child’s choos­ing), dress them in minute lit­tle out­fits and come away with an adop­tion cer­tifi­cate. Imag­ine the deci­bels! Imag­ine the push­ing and shov­ing and “you got the dress I wanted for Kiwi!!” poten­tial dis­as­ters. But Avery will be in heaven, I can guar­an­tee you that. One more crea­ture to add to the sev­eral hun­dred now in her bed every night! Bliss.

Well, we are. Gut­ted. Eng­land were defeated today by Por­tu­gal in a PSO, the dreaded “penalty shoot-out,” which means that after you’ve played the whole game and you’re tied, in this case “nil/nil”, the out­come is stripped to just this: a kicker, and a goal­keeper. The other play­ers all stand in a sym­bolic row, arms around waists, for both teams, while the kicker kicks into the goal. Each team gets five tries, and if one gets to three ahead of the other, it’s over.

But the real drama was with these two pic­tured above. For one thing, David Beck­ham is the heart and soul of the team. An hour or so into play he was kicked, or wrenched his shin, or some­thing, and after con­tin­u­ing to try to play for a few min­utes, gave up and was invalided out. It was announced later that he tore his Achille’s ten­don. Enough said. UNTIL the arguably most impor­tant actual foot­baller, Wayne Rooney, got into a tus­sle over the ball with two Por­tu­gal play­ers and after com­pletely stomp­ing one in the groin, then went on to shove away a Por­tu­gal player who came to “help” with the referee’s deci­sion. Result, RED CARD. It’s almost com­i­cal, the so-called “book­ing” process of penal­iza­tion. The ref­eree actu­ally pro­duces a col­ored card (begin­ning with yel­low and pro­gress­ing to red for a dou­ble offense) from his pocket and waves it in the air. But in this case, as when a small boy on a play­ground moves straight from “dare ya” to “triple dog dare ya” with­out the cru­cial “dou­ble dog dare ya” in between, the ref­eree skipped right from neu­tral to red card, with no yel­low card warn­ing in between. So as pun­ish­ment for a child­ish tem­per fit, Rooney was off and Eng­land were reduced to 10 men, minus as well their captain.

They were valiant, how­ever, and until the loss at the penalty shootout played bet­ter than they had all the World Cup long. End of story. There are peo­ple cry­ing in the streets. And let me tell you: I kindly let John off pick­ing up Avery at Anna’s, in the penul­ti­mate moments of the game, and got in a taxi myself, the radio in the cabby’s spot blar­ing loudly. Aside from the occa­sional ran­dom Russ­ian or Amer­i­can tourist, there was NO ONE on the streets. I have to won­der what will hap­pen to all the pent-up energy in the pubs, not to men­tion in the lit­tle Ger­man town where the match took place. Eng­lish fans are noto­ri­ously dif­fi­cult, even in tri­umph. Who knows what will hap­pen in defeat.

So there you go. Quite heart-wrenching. What will pencil-thin Vic­to­ria come up with to say to her man, when he limps off the pitch? What will the new queen of the WAGS (“Wives and Girl­friends” of the foot­ballers, to the unini­ti­ated), Coleen McLaugh­lin say to her best guy Wayne Rooney about his tem­per fit, pos­si­bly lead­ing to the loss of the match? Much bet­ter to be us, who can shed a tear and then move straight on to the com­pelling bat­tle at… WIM­BLE­DON! Right now it’s Mur­ray against Rod­dick. John and I are going on Wednes­day, so I’ll be sure to have a great court-side report for you then.