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.

I say “autumn,” you say “fall.” Obviously, I’m right. But maybe we can compromise with “harvest,” the season’s traditional name. At this time of year, anyway, what one really needs is adjectives, and “fall-like” just won’t do.

Like virtually every bookish child in the Western world, I inherited certain lessons from Laura Ingalls Wilder. Reading the “Little House on the Prairie” series as a girl, I believed three things: that my future womanly waist would be small enough for Pa’s hands to encircle; that snow could freeze maple syrup into delightful snacks; and that the secret to security and happiness lay in preserving fruits and vegetables for winter.

There’s nothing wrong with optimism, as long as you don’t get your hopes up. If one really wants something, it’s easy to put doubts aside. This time will be the exception; bad boyfriends changed into princes, strangely easy childbirth, jars of honey waved through in our carry-on luggage . . . surely, for me, it’ll work out.