Still feeling pretty chirpy I looked forward to coffee in the Contessa’s back garden. Barefoot and armed with the Sunday Observer I trotted across the dewy velvet lawn to the trellised bench at the bottom of the garden. The Contessa’s house is a terraced house on a street of nearly look-alike houses. It’s probably about 120 years old and, as she told me, therefore built for Victorian working class families. Nowadays it is home to the Contessa and her beloved Pusskin but then it housed whole families, maybe even as many as eight in residence. “Incidentally,” she told me later, “my house in Leicester is almost identical to the one my father grew up in Belfast. Must be some subconscious memory guiding me here!” Subconscious memory: what a gift when we discover where it’s taken us.