I drive 20km home from Janet and Sue's barbecue in darkness and driving rain. Forked and sheet lightening sends white flashes across the horizon, as if someone has flicked on a light in the dense black countryside. Meanwhile, white mist swirls up from the road like dry ice from a dance floor.
I pull up outside my house. Despite the damage - geraniums swept of the window ledge and a mound of smashed terracotta in the road - I find Biff stretched out in the window, as chilled as ever in the darkness and completely unbothered by the storm.
Water has come in through the kitchen and front doors and the hollyhocks are bent double in the courtyard, where most of the terracotta pots have been overturned. I go to bed with the thunder still rolling and the rain lashing down, thinking there is nothing like a good storm.
Two years ago I hung up my high heels, put the Prada handbags into storage and left behind my fashionable West London life to renovate an old village house in rural France. Et voila. This blog is about what happened next....
Sorry about the storm damage, but well done for the book sales. I am about half way through reading my copy (I only seem to have book-reading at the weekend) and I'm really loving it. I have just reached the bit where the women at the pharmacy look at your insect bites and say "oh la la" -- after 30 years away from France, I can still imagine the tone.