As a child, Charlotte Mendelson thought her grandparents' native Hungarian sounded ridiculous. But now her tiny vocabulary keeps their memory alive

Please don’t say that I’m alone. Or perhaps I am, and that’s why I do it. Yes, I know some of you, the captains of industry, the retired teachers, were forced to learn bushels of poetry, in the good old days. You can declaim “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” and “I wandered lonely as a cloud” if called upon . . . but you never are. Memorising couplets may train your intellect, and keep the great voices of the canon alive but, otherwise, does it sustain you?

For most of us, apartment dwellers and city types, houseplants are an admission of defeat. We look wistfully at plants in the supermarket—tendrils and fronds, furry flaps, spines and holes and soft neon shoots—persuading ourselves that they might bring us comfort.

Only two years ago, when I was finishing my memoir of gardening obsession, “Rhapsody in Green,” I claimed that I had no time for houseplants. Prickly, diminutive, macramé-reliant: I’d rarely been less tempted by anything.

Like the average middle-class English person, I was pretty confident about Italy. I had schlepped round Florence, felt Jamesian in Venice, almost driven off a vineyard wall in Montepulciano. Now it was time for Rome.

I am definitely not a hoarder. Trust me: I know. If my parents ever move house, it would be simpler to hire a wrecking ball.

How dare they? Oxford is my hometown; I love it. No, I hate it. Most importantly, I know it. But I never gave permission for it to change.

Ordinarily, my garden and I are embarrassing to be around. I can’t keep my hands off it; visitors, work, and children are all mere obstacles on the path of true pleasure.

People of Europe, don’t go to Moscow. You may think you are prepared, with your ultra-light down gilets and ankle boots, your vague memory of a school performance of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, your last-minute listen to Sting’s 1985 classic “Russians”, with the line that blew my, I mean your, teenage mind: “Russians love their children too.” But you are simply not tough enough. Stick to Lisbon; St Petersburg, if you’re feeling adventurous. But not Moscow.

Oh, America: blue breakfast cereals and string made of fruit are not perfectly normal childhood foodstuffs. Your young are corrupted by pleasure. Unfortunately, I was too.

When I was seventeen, in Florence, I had the best raspberry sorbet of my life.