Finally made it to Leighton House which I've been meaning to visit since it re-opened last year. Wouldn't it be lovely to host a party in the Arab Hall - with mint tea and Moroccan nibbles - and if a clumsy guest lost their footing and landed in the fountain pool, well, apparently they wouldn't be the first. (I'm now compiling a guest list of friends/family most likely to fall in.) But they'd have to go home, wet shoes or not ... this must be the grandest one-bedroom-only residence in London. I loved the contrast between downstairs grandeur and Leighton's rather monkish bachelor bedroom with its narrow bed and (shudder) shop-bought wallpaper ... Perhaps he learned from the example of the neighbour who welcomed GF Watts for a three-day visit - that extended into a stay of 21 years. After much fantasising about myself wafting down the staircase in the gown from Flaming June (which would have looked fabulous on me, ooh, about 30 years ago when I still had Pre-Raphaelite hair), I took a walk along Melbury Road admiring the studio-houses of the Holland Park Circle, now owned by feuding neighbours. And I was very amused to discover a little village of garden gnomes (honestly, on the site of Scottish artist Colin Hunter's house - destroyed by bombing so it's now flats) with every amenity a gnome who can afford the W14 postcode could desire ... washing line and outside lav, greengrocer's shop and pigsties. I wonder what Lord Leighton would have thought!