If you go from Queens Road, Richmond into Cambrian Road and walk up the hill you come to a hefty iron gate, push it hard, go through and you are in Richmond Park. If you take the right hand path and go up the slight rise and then cross the path where cyclists and pedestrians fight for space and safety you come to a small pond. A nondescript pond, called Bishop's Pond. The name has no ecclesiastical significance, it is the name of the man who was gamekeeper at the beginning of the 19th century. Whatever a pond should have it only has 50% of anything. It is not beautiful, but scruffy and muddy. No clear sparkling, rejoicing water here. The seats are rarely occupied. It has a few ducks, smaller than usual, not so quarrelsome, possibly depressed by their isolation. If you are lucky there is a heron that drops in. It is something to look at but it has no conversation, no community spirit just a detached superior air. When I am there I think about people who might have sat on the utilitarian seats and I begin to give them a life, a habitation, an experience. I wonder what they look like and what they thought.
From this came the story of Arabella who lived in one of those cottages down the road and Robert who was a visitor and the life they lived half in the country and half in the town, in the days when Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister, to be followed by John Major and Tony Blair.