Home again, safe and sound. I’m just touching base at the moment. I hope to be back in the saddle tomorrow evening. The cats are well, although my absence doesn't seem to have made them fonder of each other; quite the contrary.

The cruise was wonderful. It is sad to think that we 12 will never assemble again. The Hebrides are beautiful, and fascinating. Dolphins skipped along beside our boat, clearly having fun. I’ll tell you about it in bits, with at least some pictures. I got quite a bit of knitting done.

Then, on Thursday, I went down to London, for Wimbledon on Friday, despite Federer’s loss. Rachel and I were there – you may have heard of it – for the longest semi-final in Wimbledon history, and the second-longest match of all. It was incredibly tedious. By the beginning of the fourth set, if not the ending of the third, all one wanted in the world was for it to end. The idiot calls of “Come on John” and “Come on Kevin” were joined by “Come on Somebody”. And, once, "Come on, chaps -- we want to see Rafa."

I wondered whether they would put the next match on at all – the one we all wanted to see. They did, at 8 p.m. or so, Nadal v Djokovic. Rachel and I stayed for three games, and saw the sort of tennis we had hoped to see all afternoon, sharp and intelligent and strategic. Then we went sadly home. They played until 11, and we watched it on television with our supper. I was too tired by then to grasp the finer points – who was serving, what the significance of the point. But I could see the beauty of the play.

I missed the end yesterday, due to the journey home. Rachel says it was one of the great matches, and, she hopes, as we tell the story in later years, it will gradually turn out that we saw all of it.

But I wanted to post this early today, before kick-off, to say how much I hope to see Kevin Anderson humiliated this afternoon – the Grinch who stole Wimbledon, the man single-handedly responsible for depriving me of the lifetime chance to see Federer play, and Nadal, and Djokovic.