The original plan was to hire a river-boat for a week and travel up the Thames from Oxford, but this was our baby's first real outing and the other family had just returned from a holiday so in the end we made it a day trip. There had been a lot of talk of Weil's disease which you can catch from dirty river water but it was such an unusually hot day that on the return journey I dived in and was soon followed by the children and the other father. They all swam close to the boat, playing and shouting and struggling to climb back on board. I find swimming boring and focus too much on imagined horrors below, so to keep busy I swam away from the boat toward the far bank. The boat and everyone on it looked small from there. I circled for a while, waited for a boat to pass and then swam back. It was a small boat but it was surprisingly hard to climb back in without a ladder. All the towels were wet so I stayed in the sun and joined the children sitting in the bows trailing our feet in the water

It was raining when we arrived and it rained throughout the lavish lunch that the collectors had put on for us. It was raining, though less heavily, as the hostess and I wandered around the ornate gardens smoking cigars and deciding where to place some sculptures that she had ordered. It finally stopped raining as we said our goodbyes and wished them a happy Christmas. We got back into my wife's Renault and, still waving, backed out of the drive. It's a small car and the windows fogged immediately. I was sitting in the back with my daughter. I wound down my window as we headed for the road that borders the lake back to Geneva. It was getting dark and I asked my wife to stop the car and let me walk for a while. She drove a little down the road and I guess she chatted with my gallerist about the collectors while they waited for me to catch up