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beans and made our own yoghurt but unlike real proper hippies, we didn’t have to, we chose to. Dad may have kept his accountancy background a secret but he obviously had some skill and his fair share of luck because he made a quiet killing playing the stock market.I mean we had central heating and new underwear and good haircuts and insurance. There was a compost heap out the back and a vegetable garden but that’s about as self-sufficient as we got. And I say the house was ramshackle but it more had the appearance of being ramshackle. It needed attention on the outside (the windowsills flaked paint and ivy grew wild and fierce) but inside everything was in perfect working order and should it ever fail to be, someone was brought in quick smart to fix it.
    But the house was busy, in more ways than one. Bright colours hummed from the walls, Indian cotton cushions were strewn from wall to wall, unannounced visitors dropped in constantly, music pounded from the stereo. It was modern and edgy and loose. Poppy thrived. She was a little girl who went with the flow. I, on the other hand, went to Rose’s.
    Her house was the opposite of my parents’. It was quiet and structured, even to look at. It was three storeys, as Marguerite had seen in the tea leaves, plastered brick that was painted a calm creamy colour. Georgian, with large sash windows, a delightfully overgrown garden at the back and a cobbled courtyard at the front. The only thing that kept it from being symmetrical — I loved symmetry, was obsessed by it, to my parents’ further shame — was a boxy twentieth-century addition at the ground level on the Warwick Place side.
    From the front it looked out on the pretty blue Westbourne Terrace Road Bridge and the sparkling (as I always thought of it) expanse of water that is the junction where Regent’s Canal meets the Grand Union Canal. This was my favourite view in all the world.
    Little Venice, nestled into the elbow of Maida Vale and Paddington, wasn’t really anything like big Venice but those two waterways with their collection of colourful canal boatsand cobbled walkways did give it a charm you could not find anywhere else in the city.
    Regent’s Canal curled from our junction to the Thames at Limehouse, while the Grand Union meandered all the way to Birmingham in the north, I believed. There, right in front of our house, the two met in a large pool with Browning’s Island in the middle. The poet Robert Browning had lived in the area and was rumoured to have given Little Venice its name, which certainly made sense given the poetic license employed.
    Once upon a time the canals had provided the city with an important industrial transport route but then fast moving white vans took over, I suppose, although officially the railway got there first. Boats were now just a delightful decorative addition. Anyway, my great-grandfather had bought the house in the 1920s when the elegant eighteenth-century mansions on either side of the flagging canal were going for a song. A doctor, he’d built the boxy extension that housed his surgery and my grandfather, also a doctor, used it for the same purpose although had ‘modernised’ it sometime in the ’60s.
    My grandfather and Rose must have rattled around in such a big place but it was an oasis of off-white and peace compared to my hectic home life and I loved it. Everything was in its place and the place never changed. When I came to stay, Rose would always make a big fuss about meals because meal times were not recognised at home, apparently being a contrived archaic structure. This was the cause of much sourness between my parents and Rose and me, for that matter.
    At Rose’s we had dinner in the dining room at seven, breakfast in the kitchen at eight, lunch in the garden — weather permitting — at half-past twelve and if we didn’t bake something ourselves for afternoon tea at three, which we usually did, we would go out for this most refined of eating