It’s not often I’m inclined to stare at myself in the mirror, honest. But on this occasion I simply had to, because this particular reflection simply didn’t look like me at all.

It could have been the 90-minute signature massage with camomile and lavender oils, the Thai cookery lesson which had me wanting to stuff myself silly; the snorkelling trip where we swam with manta rays, or maybe the daily 7am beach-side runs I’d managed to fit in since arriving at the Dusit Thani resort in the Maldives four days ago.

Whatever it was (maybe I should also mention the wine lesson from the resident sommelier) it had wiped the cares of the world from my face.

I don’t do sitting around on a beach, but I had needed to relax. An imminent move away from my family, a wedding in the planning, a redundancy and my partner’s new high powered job had left me so anxious my GP had prescribed me tranquillisers.

Thanks to the hospitality of the Maldivians, not to mention the gorgeous beaches and oh-so amazing cuisine (and yes I did do healthy and gorge on seafood fruit and vegetables all week) I had been able to throw the packet away.

Facing my fear, and greatest challenge though was the diving, which certainly took me out of myself. At the Vivanta resort we managed to encounter, though not at too close a range, reef sharks and sting rays.

I even managed to make use of the underwater camera lent to me by friends. As I marvelled at the colourful parrot fish and took in the coral preservation work by the resort’s reef I took stock of why this place literally seemed a world away.

From feeling literally out of my depth, I was now embracing the open ocean without a care in the world.

At the Four Seasons in Kuda Huraa (meaning little island) I even managed to become a surf groupie for the day; we watched an international surfing championship there.

My sunrise room –  great if like me you want a natural alarm clock but maybe not so good if you’ve over-done cocktails at the poolside cocktail bar the night before,  was simply amazing.

Lulled to sleep by the lapping of the waves, not to mention a very satisfied stomach courtesy of the  Four Season’s award-winning Indian restaurant Baraaburu, I was in some kind of heaven.

As I was packing to go home, an Eagle ray stopped outside my bedroom window; all the rooms are suspended over the sea. There’s not much that makes me gasp in amazement but that was it. Baby or no baby, move or no move, I was ready to embrace life’s challenges again.

Book at the Dusit Thani (www.dusit.com/dusit-thani/maldives). The Vivanta (www.vivantabytaj.com) The Four Seasons (www.fourseasons.com/maldiveskh/) British Airways (ba.com) flies three times a week from London Gatwick to the capital Male.

(A version of this article first appeared in the November 2012 edition of Zest magazine)

Last week, LA Live was alive with British voices calling out to one another on the way to a concert performance of The Who’s rock opera, Quadrophenia, by the band’s two aged survivors – Roger Daltrey and Pete Townshend – and a string of younger backing players.

LA Live is the Los Angeles answer to London’s Leicester Square. In the midst of dowdy, neglected downtown, about 25 miles east of the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, Santa Monica, Venice Beach and Malibu, speculators such as Philip Anschutz, owner of London’s O2 Arena, have poured billions of dollars into a gamble that they can revive the city’s historic heart with bright lights and top names.

I have laughed at Ricky Gervais and Eddie Izzard in the Nokia and, as well as the Who, the Staples Centre has held shows by Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Fleetwood Mac, Britney Spears and Justin Bieber. It is home to the Lakers and the Clippers, the local basketball rivals, and the Kings ice hockey team.

With typical west coast boosterism, LA Live calls itself “the most entertaining place on the planet”. That is a big claim, but ranged around LA Live’s square are 20 fast-food joints and coffee shops, anchored on the north side by the 7,000-seater Nokia Theatre and the Staples Center arena, about the size of Wembley Arena and hosting concerts, ice skating, boxing – anything that will attract about 20,000 spectators. The 14-screen Regal cinema and the ESPN West Coast Broadcast Centre add media glamour.

In the middle of the space, instead of Leicester Square’s trees, is a platform for open-air events or, at least, audience-participation games to keep the crowds amused.

LA Live is officially described as the premier destination for live entertainment in Downtown Los Angeles. That’s because it’s about the only live entertainment centre in Downtown, which has never fully recovered from the shock of its wealthy residents deserting it in the 1920s in favour of Beverly Hills.

One of the LA City Council’s main preoccupations is how to get it back to where it was, but it’s a slow process. As in New York, it’s quite edgy to live in a loft space there – if you’re a lawyer or accountant who likes to walk to work. But the real money stays west.

Like most US cities, LA has created a passable miniature imitation of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, with banks, rents and fancy restaurants to match.

But the LA Live square still seems oddly out of place, like a party in a nunnery. Duck under the nearby freeway and you are in a different world, almost a third-world country with rundown warehouses and car-repair lots.

But Anschutz and his business partners seem determined to pull the area up by its bootstraps. They have persuaded Mariott hotels to take a tower, a few floors of which have been designated a Ritz-Carlton. It doesn’t seem like the right surroundings for a five-star hotel – you wouldn’t want to walk your dog down some of the surrounding streets after dark – but the big sporting and showbiz events do pull in the money.

Quite a few surrounding businesses make a decent living on the back of LA Live. If you want to beat the official $25 parking fee for an evening, there are plenty of office multi-storey car parks willing to let visitors in for as little as $5 when the pen-pushers have driven home. And there are some reasonable Italian and Indian restaurants within walking distance.

The next item on the to-do list is to bring professional American football back to LA after the Raiders and the Rams quit because they could no longer fill the stadiums. But the National Football League, which controls where the pro teams are based, knows it can drive a hard bargain and is doing so.

Daltrey and Townshend sound more like a firm of lawyers than a rock band, and they were looking their age after an energetic two-hour set that earned that what in LA is regarded as a mandatory standing ovation. Staying seated to applaud is an insult.

Then we joined the crowds streaming out of the Staples, walked up the street to our cut-price parking space – $7 in our case, no expense spared – zipped onto the freeway and we were home in ten minutes.

LA is rightly proud of its theatre, from the majestic Disney concert hall to Theatre Row on Santa Monica Boulevard, from the 1920 Moorish architecture of the Pasadena Playhouse to endless little groups of players scattered around North Hollywood, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Venice Beach.

All those resting actors have to keep their hand in somehow.

North Hollywood, proclaimed on a street-wide arch as Noho, doesn’t feel like Hollywood at all, not like the tourist bit where Shirley Temple’s tiny feet are etched in concrete and Spiderman lookalikes charge to have their photo taken with ten-year-old children.

No Jimmy Savile lookalikes yet, thank goodness.

NoHo, north of the 101 freeway, is way cooler than that. It’s slightly shabby, with edgy clothes stores, the obligatory gym and a tai kwon do centre.

It suddenly goes corporate at the next crossroads, a big Hewlett Packard complex sitting opposite a luggage shop and a Starbucks. I sat outside sipping decaf skinny latte and looking indistinguishable from everyone else in sunglasses, black top and blue jeans. I know how to blend in!

I was in NoHo to visit the Antaeus Theatre Company, which does a neat line in classic plays, for its version of Macbeth.

Squeezed into a row of shops, the theatre doesn’t have much room but, practical as ever in LA, it has an agreement to let customers use the Citibank parking lot across the street outside banking hours.

Inside, no one bothered checking tickets and, as the seats weren’t reserved, anyone with a dollop of chuzpah could probably save themselves the $36 price of admission and just sit down.

The short, dark entrance tunnel led straight onto the front of the stage, which wasn’t actually raised. Steps led up the middle of steeply banked rows of seats, with room for 80 or so.

After an appeal for funds, the house lights went down and music struck up to start the action.

The director had decided that the play needed updating a little. All the men wore leather skirts and Doc Marten boots, which suited some better than others. The famous opening line, “When shall we three meet again?”, was agonisingly delayed because the opening scene was turned into a baby’s funeral.

While this could just about be traced to later dialogue, the funeral had to be played out in silence because Shakespeare had not written anything for such an event – and the Antaeus does not actually put words into the Bard’s mouth. Not knowingly, anyway.

While the tragic aspect of Macbeth demands that the title role be a confused, conflicted character, this one seemed a little too weak and indecisive to command armies and cruelly connive against rivals. His stock expression was wide-eyed panic. Banquo and one of the three witches was black, which won points for PCness but was stretching things a little for medieval Scotland. Come on, you can’t do Othello every week.

As this was a Sunday matinee, it came as a bit of a shock to emerge from the dark theatre into blinding sunshine at the interval.

In the tiny foyer, a volunteer sold water and muffins for $1. An orderly single queue took it in turns to use the two loos. Although the interval was supposed to be 15 minutes, in practice it was a long as it took the last patron to do the necessary.

In the second half the actors’ English accents started to slip. Most went outright American: one of the leaders called his troops into “baddle”. OK, I know that’s unfair. I would probably do far worse with a 17th century Salem accent if I were in Arthur Miller’s Crucible.

Nevertheless, it jarred as the bloody murders littered the stage. One corpse’s leg stuck out from behind the scenery and its owner had to discreetly pull it out of sight.

Unaccountably, the witches smartened up and took their seats at the banquet scene. Needs must when the cast is small. Macbeth looked increasingly harrassed, but Banquo played the Ghost brilliantly with his back to the audience, spinning round to speak his lines then spinning back again. Order was eventually restored, Malcolm claimed the kingdom and we all trooped out feeling that justice had been done.

After that, at five o’clock in the afternoon, what better than a curry? A short walk from the theatre is Salomi, one of LA’s best Indian restaurants – at least to English taste buds – with Kingfisher beer and a chef willing to make the dishes as hot as we liked. Shakespeare would have approved.

A very warm welcome to  Lemon House Life a  new blog from Ruth Osborn, you might remember her  Our Lady in Italy.

Well she’s now set up her own blog Lemon House Life to share her thoughts on fresh life and fresh food in northern Tuscany. Ruth moved to Italy with her partner James last year and she’s been enjoying Italian life ever since.

Read her latest blog – where she shares her recipe for beef with spiced wine and roast roots.

So the ludicrous 18-month hoopla of the US election process has left us pretty well where we started – with the same leader of the free world facing pretty much the same set of head-bending intractable problems, from the recession to China to whether American Idol will ever be the same without Simon Cowell.

I was in line at 7.15 in the morning, a quarter of an hour after the poll opened, at a polling place – not a station, here – in a backroom of the local Assistance League. Selection of suitable venues is, shall we say, more varied than in Britain’s normal reliance on schools and churches. Branches of McDonald’s are sometimes used and, bizarrely, even private houses.

Americans often think nothing of queuing for hours to vote. I often wonder why they don’t simply open more locations. I waited about 20 minutes before first my name and then my address were carefully crossed off by different officials in return for my signature – without asking for any ID.

Then I was given the voting card, about three inches wide and maybe 18 inches long. In the booth the voter slides it into a black, plastic frame and it is held in place by a couple of red pegs.

Then the real business starts: choosing a President and Vice-President as a pair, plus a Senator, Congresswoman and state attorney-general.

Those are fairly predictable in a Californian city, all of which are solid Democrat. Less predictable are the votes on State-wide propositions and County measures, 11 questions this time, ranging from the death penalty to compulsory condoms for porn actors. You show your choice by punching a hole – nothing as simple as marking with a cross.

I was out by 7.45, awarded my “I voted” sticker and off to Starbucks for a well-deserved coffee and instant porridge.
It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, there are basically three ways of spending an election night watching the results come in on TV: at a party, in a town square or snacking and drinking at home with like-minded friends.

In the Los Angeles area there wasn’t much going on in town squares that I knew of, and I’m sure the smart crowd had their discreet parties at the Beverly Wilshire or the California Club in Downtown LA, but I went for the third choice – just like millions of Brits do when the UK polls close.

We’ve become regular friends with three other couples, all of a similar age and political outlook, who we see over a meal or in a book club, so it was an obvious plan to congregate at Pat and Elaine’s elegant Spanish-stye house for what we thought we going to be a nailbiter of an evening.

Nachos, hummus, guacamole, grapes, goat’s cheese and biscuits got us started before I and the other three guys were packed off to the local branch of Chipotle to collect takeaways of beans, fajita, chicken, salsa and lettuce – all very healthy and the identical menu to the chain’s British branches.

Then we trooped into our friends’ version of the family room. They don’t have children, but that is no barrier. This is a curious Californian housing custom that we had never come across until we bought and then sold a house of our own.

Every home aims to have a family room, a den with some easy chairs and, crucially, a TV. It has to be separate from the sitting room, which has a formality that harks back to the “Sunday best” room in northern working-class terraces. The sitting room is where people sit and talk over a drink. The family room – with or without family – is where they lean back and watch TV.

We have found houses where the most inconvenient corner – maybe part of the kitchen or just an enlarged cupboard – is dressed up as the family room for selling purposes. We don’t have one in our house, but I suppose we’ll have to fashion one if we move.

Unusually, Pat and Elaine’s family room is upstairs and it was a bit of a squeeze for the eight of us, but our hosts gallantly sat on the floor.

After a grinding election campaign, and what from the Democrats’ point of view had been a worrying surge in popularity by Mitt Romney since the first of the televised debates, the end came surprisingly early, and easily.

The three-hour time difference between the east and west coasts is more of a factor than Europeans often realise, whether planning a trip or watching World Series baseball. What’s more, several east-coast states closed their polls as early as 6pm, which is 3pm in California.

So by the time we gathered at 6pm – evening events start much earlier here than in London – the exit polls from across the country were beginning to trickle through. The first states went their expected way, and there were delays in the key battleground states of Florida and Virginia. North Carolina, which Obama won in 2008, duly returned to the Republicans.

We were watching the left-leaning MSNBC, but all the TV stations had impressive statistics and graphics, keeping a running total as Obama and Romney crept towards the clinching 270 electoral college votes. Americans still do not directly elect their President.

The mood began to change when Obama won Pennsylvania, a Republican hope. The reporter at the Republican HQ in Romney’s state, Massachusetts, was saying that the atmosphere there was going quiet and no one would talk to her.
Then, suddenly, it was all over.

At 8.13pm west coast time the TV networks projected that Obama had won Ohio to give him 274 votes. It took another two hours for Romney to concede, and meanwhile the tension went out of the TV coverage – and our room.

All that remained was Obama’s statesmanlike, Lincolnesque victory speech and, instead of the all-night vigil we had expected, we were saying our goodbyes soon after 11pm.

Ominously, though the futures market was correctly predicting a bad day on Wall Street as worries shifted to the so-called fiscal cliff. It’s business as usual in Washington.

Another day, another article about how boring motherhood is. Admittedly the writer of the most recent article (published in Grazia today) has a book called ‘Why have kids’ to flog sell.

In my view, Jessica Valenti (who calls herself  a ‘feminist’) appears to  want to deny other women the right to enjoy the fulfillment that motherhood brings.

But I wouldn’t take her musings quite so seriously. Why? Because at the end of the article she admits that while motherhood didn’t bring her ultimate contentment  it is an experience not to missed.

That’s the point though, being a mum isn’t a box to tick – it’s about wanting to care for, nurture and protect another human being, added to that of course  the biologically driven and ultimately selfish desire to replicate ourselves.

So why has she written this book.?Well my guess is her publisher wants to capitalise on the paranoia of many 30 something (mostly single) women who are worried that they will never have children. And the 30something women who have chosen not to have children but feel guilty about that choice.

I can understand why having children might end up leaving some women feeling bereft. But I think that’s more to do with society’s expectations than our own.

Good example: when I told friends and family that I was pregnant again the reaction ranged from: “‘Isn’t Sammy a career girl, surely another will spell the end of hers,” or “I always thought Sammy was a career girl and only wanted one.”

I have to say my career has taken a back seat, in fact it’s so far back it’s squashed underneath the buggy/tricycle and scooter languishing at the back of our battered people carrier.

But that was more because of the recession, if work had been plentiful (i.e. there was still a demand for financial journalists with internet as well as ‘old fashioned’ print experience) then maybe I’d not have had the time to have another. Nor the time to enjoy motherhood so much that despite a very touch and go labour with my daughter I decided it was worth the risk to do it again.

I am scared that having this baby will ultimately spell the end of my career and I will be one of those mums who ends up feeling like she’s lost her arm and gained another head.

To any potential employer, and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost the chance of several jobs because of my mum status, I’m still as driven as I was before we started our  family, even more so.

In fact being a mum has made me the ultimate organised professional. More so as Imogen’s gotten older.

But again if it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be and hopefully in the end  I will be able to keep  my career, after all enough 40something women are disappearing from the professional work place, and I don’t intend to be one of them, ever, motherhood or not.

I’m taking a particularly close interest in November’s US presidential election, because this is the first in which I, as a citizen for not quite a year, will have a vote.

In the past week, what had seemed like a close-fought but predictable contest has been turned on its head.

On October 3 a TV debate performance by Barack Obama which is generally agreed, even by his friends, to have been lacklustre has given new hope and fresh impetus to his challenger, Mitt Romney.

As the gas from Obama’s balloon escaped it appeared to be pumped directly into Romney, who visibly expanded. After an hour or so, their roles seemed to be reversed: Obama looked like an almost apologetic challenger, while Romney took on the air of the incumbent.

From where I sit, on the outskirts of Los Angeles, this is very much a spectator sport. No matter what happens California will vote solidly Democrat at the presidential, congressional and state levels.

When I step outside my front door, to my right is a Romney banner stuck in the grass on two metal legs. But as I walk down the street that gesture is outweighed by four Obama banners. Another Romney house proclaims its loyalty down the far end, where the smarter properties sit.

Up Lake Avenue, one of the main shopping streets, the Obama campaign has taken over the premises of Smith & Hawken, an upmarket garden centre that went belly-up last year. The Republicans have set up camp in a more discreet tree-lined street round the corner, nearer the town centre.

But, while the local honchos rally their troops, the real battles will take place in the nine so-called “swing states”, where the result is in doubt: Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin.

But does that mean Los Angeles is being neglected by the big guns? Not at all. Obama has been a regular visitor for the past couple of years. Not that he is worried about the city’s loyalty. No, he regularly descends to pick up campaign contributions from LA’s plentiful millionaires, particularly in the movie industry.

Only last Monday the traffic was disrupted for hours on end yet again as the police closed major roads so that Obama could get to and from whatever fundraiser event was being laid on for him with no security threats or delays.

This is a little bugbear of mine, for after several such visits he has not uttered a word of apology for the trouble he causes each time – which I think is plain rude. Believe me, you only have to be stuck in an Obama-inspired gridlock once. It’s hell. Not that he cares which way I’ll be voting.

Meanwhile, despite a timely fall in unemployment below the crucial 8% level, the opinion polls have suddenly lurched Romney-wards. The liberal media – which is most of it – has been full of handwringing and advice to Obama on how he can and must do better next time. He and Romney face the cameras on each of the next two Tuesdays.

The Democrats take heart from history, showing that since Kennedy and Nixon began the TV debates in 1960 the sitting president has often begun badly then got his act together. Of course, Romney is equally well aware of that, and will be preparing accordingly.

I suspect that this contest will be decided on the narrowest of margins, probably by some totally unexpected event.

One of the great myths about LA is that everyone has a pool. It’s really not true.

When I was house-hunting, we found about one place in four had a pool in the back garden – or back yard as they self-deprecatingly call the expanse behind the house, whether it is a muddy postage stamp or endless acres of manicured lawns patrolled 24/7 by menacing security guards.

Maybe all that means is that I wasn’t looking at the right houses, or ones that were expensive enough. I’m sure above a certain price a pool is as mandatory as a built-in BBQ (what? you don’t have one of those?).

But every so often I have come across a house accompanied by the archetypal LA pool – with jacuzzi, blue tiles, a white wall on one side, enough room for a dozen loungers on the other side, palm trees swaying gently in the breeze. And did I mention a baking sun?

Even better if you come across such an iconic scene when you have been invited to a party there – which I was the other day.

As in most parts of the world, urban hillsides bring out the inventive side of LA architects.

This gem, round the corner from Warner Bros. studios and overlooking (at a discreet distance) the 101 freeway, tumbled over at least six floors – to be honest I lost count.

It belongs to three bronzed middle-aged guys who have lived there nearly 30 years and gradually added bits here and there, and there. Work is still going on.

I was there as a guest of the singer and ukelele supremo Ian Whitcomb who, with his Bungalow Boys, was providing the entertainment with a string of 1920s and 1930s songs.

They performed on a fully-equipped stage, complete with professional lighting and one of those balls hanging from the ceiling that sends lights all round the room.

Spread out in front of them were half a dozen large tables covered in orange tablecloths, and beyond that a full bar. This was about five feet above the pool, so provided an ideal spot from which to dive bomb, drenching those trying to top up their tan on the loungers. Such fun.

Below pool level was a games room with its own loo (very important), four pinball machines and a window onto the pool, where a variety of whiteish limbs dangled in the blue water.

Indoors, next to a mirrored loo with two external doors, was a room filled by a triple bed. Paintings of naked bodies covered the walls. A staircase led down to the kitchen and an ornate dining room, reproduction 18th century furniture roughly 18th century.

I helped myself in the kitchen from steaming trays of vegetable stew, beef stroganoff, green salad and boiled rice. Amid the candelabras on the dining table were bowls heaped with bon-bons, to fill any corners that had been unaccountably neglected.

On the dining room terrace, a Latino family had camped and were talking animatedly among themselves in Mexican Spanish.

More stairs wound back down to the reception area, stocked with elaborately cushioned sofas, a genuine 1950s juke box, a plasma-screen television. And a lift.

There, by a wall, was a cage that looked as if it had been made for a very tall, thin parrot. Unclasp the door, step in and you feel as if you are encased in your very own gilded personal prison. I pressed the down button and waved goodbye, a little uncertainly, to my companions.

I descended to a gloomy storage area, chairs and tables piled higgledy-piggledy in the semi-darkness pierced only by a shaft of sunlight to remind me I was still in California.

I pressed the button again and found myself in a garage at street level, where a team of valets had been hired to park every guest’s car somewhere on the winding, cramped and already heavily parked streets.

They had their own portaloo (known in LA as portapotties) to keep them company as they sat in the sun smoking and trying to pass the time. I waved. They waved. I got back in the lift.

As if that weren’t enough floors, by the front door a temporary railway sloped upwards, taking a mobile pulpit up the incline to the highest level, where the owners were working on extending the property even further. On a terrace up there, a pig turned on the spit over a smoking fire while a helper carved slices and slipped them effortlessly between a couple of slices of sourdough bread.

As the afternoon wore into evening, the tanned brunette in the dazzling blue-and-white bikini stopped dive-bombing the pool and a contented haze of pot smoke settled over the party. The cars on the 101 zoomed by. Southern California was at ease with itself.

It seems like just a few weeks since we planted our 10cm high seedlings in our vegetable patch, but the combination of an unusually wet May (for Italy) followed by blazing sun in June, means that almost everything in our garden is flourishing beyond our wildest dreams.

The squash plants that my friend Palmina gave me appear to be triffids in disguise and clamber over everything that gets in their way. There are even melons that get visibly bigger every day.

And as for the courgettes……to begin with, we were like excited children – raw zucchini, with oil, lemon and parmesan as a lunch time salad…frittata, or Delia’s roast vegetable salad for dinner. After two weeks of courgettes at least once a day though, the stack in my fridge was still growing and James’ enthusiasm was wearing just a little.

By comparison with Italy’s plum harvest, though, the courgette glut pales into insignificance. Last week I came home to find that Palmina had left ‘a few’ plums and apricots (10 kilos to be precise) on our garden table – on top of the carrier bag full of plums, presented by Francesco, the day before, and the apricots that Franco had given us that morning.

Urgent action was called for, and so last Wednesday, scorching hot day or not, I devoted the entire day to preserving fruit and veg. The freezer is now neatly stacked with bags of plums, ready for fruit crumble in the winter. My jars of home made jam would do the WI proud and my plum vodka is quietly maturing in the cantina.

The courgettes presented more of a challenge – they definitely don’t freeze – however a quick scan of the internet offered lots of solutions. How to deal with a zucchini glut has exercised many minds, including those of Mumsnet bloggers.

Courgette cake may taste good, but I wanted something that would last longer (and be less fattening). The answer came in the form of a delicious (even before it’s been given time to mature) spicy chutney recipe, courtesy of River Cottage – http://www.rivercottage.net/users/Pam%20the%20Jam/blog/1281015134-courgette-aid-and-jam-fest

While I’m proud of my produce, my efforts seem minuscule compared with many of our neighbours. Every Italian seems to have been born with the urge to be self sufficient and we are surrounded by fields of every kind of vegetable – all for home eating.

Vanda tells me that last year she bottled 150 litres of passata. Of course they haven’t used a fraction of it yet, and soon it will be time to start on this year’s tomato crop.

Eugenio our builder friend has planted a 50 metre row of green beans, and another of tomato plants. He lives alone and just eats out most of the time. ‘What will you do with them all?’ I ask.

‘Make passata?’ he answers rather lamely.

While it feels like we have been enjoying masses of wonderful produce for weeks now, in reality the harvest has only just began…. The hundreds of apple and pear trees are already weighed down with fruit that won’t ripen until the autumn …. At the end of August there will be masses of lovely fresh figs. And the plums we have had so far were just the early crop. The September crop will be even bigger.

At 12.10 pm New York time on August 23, 1926, Rudolph Valentino, the silent screen’s greatest heart-throb died of peritonitis at the age of 31.

He was so revered that two funerals were held for him, in New York and then near his home in Los Angeles, each attended by 100,000 mourners. Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks Snr. were pallbearers.

Valentino’s ashes were interred at the Hollywood Forever cemetery at the scrappier end of Santa Monica Boulevard, a resting place for show-biz legends from Fairbanks to Cecil B. de Mille that appropriately backs on to Paramount Studios.

Every year since 1927 a memorial service has been held for Valentino, who was born Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filibert Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguolla. It begins at 12.10 pm Pacific time, which strictly speaking is three hours late. But, hey, who in LA would turn up at 9 am?

This year’s ceremony, filmed by German TV, marked the 86th anniversary of Valentino’s death but the 85th anniversary of the first memorial service, though it was therefore the 86th time the service had been held. LA was never strong on math.

Nor is it strong on memorial services. Frequently, as with Michael Jackson three years ago, it is held on the same day as the funeral. This is a little strange to Brits used to a decent delay so that the memorial can be a celebration of the dead person’s life.

Consequently, even for such a big star as Valentino, the dress code is, er, wide-ranging – from suits and ties to shorts and flip-flops. The cemetery’s owner, Tyler Cassity, wore an open-necked check shirt and dark grey slacks.

For the women, the fashion has been set by the Woman (or Women) in Black. At the first memorial service, a year after Valentino’s death – they waited a decent interval in those days – a women dressed entirely in black, complete with black veil, entered the mausoleum, laid a single red rose at the great man’s plaque and left. The local press went wild.

In a town whose inhabitants never miss an opportunity for publicity, the next year two women in black appeared. Year by year more sprouted until by the 1940s there were crowds of them jostling to pay their respects and not talk to the news media.

In 1947 the original woman in black, Ditra Flamé, revealed her identity and her story. Valentino had been a friend of her mother. When Ditra was in hospital he brought her a red rose and allegedly said: “You are going to outlive me by many years. But if I die before you do, please come and stay by me because I don’t want to be alone.”

Flamé died in 1984, but other women have continued the tradition – including, bizarrely, a black woman wearing white. Latterly the role has been taken up in more dignified style by Karie Bible, a movie historian with encyclopaedic knowledge which she displays generously on tours of the Hollywood Forever cemetery.

While Bible sat demurely in the front row, more than a hundred people filed in behind her, many waving fans against the stifling heat.

The hour-long service consisted of songs, reminiscences, film clips, poetry readings and attempts to place Valentino in some sort of historical context. The religious element was limited.

A celebrated LA entertainer, Will Ryan, accompanied himself on the ukulele in a version of The Sheik of Araby – Valentinto made two Sheik movies.

Mary Mallory, author of Hollywoodland, a history of the Hollywood sign, told us how Valentino’s last house in Whitley Heights, was stripped by souvenir hunters and became so dangerous that it had to be razed by the LA city authorities.

Michael Kouris, a musician, singer and ghost hunter, sang Ave Maria, told how Valentino and Mae West used to go to seances together and claimed that he had last spoken to Valentino only three months earlier.

A writer, Michael Oldham, publicized his new novel, The Valentino Formula, and declared mysteriously: “He has mythological implications to him.”

The service ended with a reading of the 23rd Psalm, The Lord is my Shepherd, for which the by now restive audience remained seated. And that was that.

My contribution was to go to an excellent Italian restaurant, Palermo, and eat a tomato and mozzarella salad.

If you are a Valentino fan, note August 23 in your diary for next year. Admission is free and open to the public. Just don’t bring a woman in black. She’ll come by herself.