I’m standing in the bathroom on the upper floor – you really don’t have to know what I’m doing –looking wistfully through the chartreuse-coloured cascade that is the weeping willow at the bottom of our garden and across the canal to Victoria Park. It is `just spring when the world is puddle-wonderful’ as American poet E.E. Cummings once put it, and we can no longer enter it. Like pints after work and an evening at the theatre, our beloved park is just a memory. It’s encaged by tall iron gates.

London is a series of villages and we Londoners are all villagers at heart, fiercely proud of our own corner of the city. I live in urban Islington but was born in leafy Wimbledon on the other side of London. Wimbledon Common was a frequent destination in my youth - for childhood rambles, winter snowballing, and teenage high-jinx. So, on the 150th anniversary of the Wimbledon Common’s 1871 creation, I re-visited this much-loved green space finding it much as I’d always remembered.