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was shaking so badly.
    So much for my dad. These days, my immediate family is just Mummy, who prefers flowers, Pan, a sisterly pain in the bum, and Roo.
    No wonder I love Roo best of all.
    My plans for her future had taken longer than I’d wished to get off the ground because the person I needed to talk to, Major John Beard-Trenchard, was away until the following week. I’d called him on his mobile, explained the situation, and fixed up lunch, but he was playing golf in the Caribbean and visiting exotic gardens and couldn’t be induced to come home early. (When I say in the Caribbean , I don’t mean literally, since golf happens on golf courses, but, on the other hand, the balls seem to shoot off anywhere, frequently into water, so it could have been literal after all. Boring game, anyway.)
    I’d better take a moment to explain how the Major comes into this.
    He really was in the army, somewhere back in the year dot (he still tends to stand in that rigid military way, as if he’s got a musket up his backside, though it could be stiffness in the joints), but plants have always been his real love: he brought horticulture to television in the early days when the only other gardening programme was Bill and Ben. Nowadays he holds directorships and sits on Boards, and has his own company, Persiflage Productions, specialising in all things rural. He’s an old friend of my mother’s (horticultural types invariably are); rumour has it she once saved his life, or his reputation, or whatever. Something to do with begonias. He produced Earth Works , the series which kick-started my career. Apparently he was discussing it over lunch with Mummy, saying he needed a female sidekick for Mortimer Sparrow to give it a bit of glamour, and she suggested me. I was acting at the time, resting between jobs, so I accepted the offer, though I wasn’t really that keen. Any child of Mummy’s can’t help knowing about gardening, but I had no intention of digging, or weeding, or getting my hands dirty. (Fortunately, you have researchers to do all that.) Anyway, by the end of a year I was getting more fan mail than Morty and I left to present Gilding the Lily , which focused on the gardens of the rich and famous.
    This gave me a lot more scope to develop my image, wafting between banks of flowers in designer dresses, which I didn’t have to pay for because I was going to wear them on television, and hanging out with A-list stars. Fame, as everyone knows, is catching – a bit like measles – and I caught it. I’m not much good at maths, but this is the kind of equation I can handle: the total famousness of any given group of famous people is more than the sum total of their fame. Or something. I became a star in my own right and Gilding the Lily ran and ran, until it ran itself out of prime time and into an afternoon slot, at which point I left. Julian, my agent, says it’s essential to quit while you’re ahead, and not to get stuck in the dead zone between two and six when the only people who watch are OAPs, on the dole, or chronically ill. Of course, for a TV personality, not being on TV, even for one season, can be the kiss of death, but overexposure is equally fatal. Too much of one face on the small screen and viewers get ‘face fatigue’. Remember that guy with the big mouth and the cockney accent who used to be on all the time ? And the woman with the flick and the gravitas? One moment they’re there, and then they’re gone. In the trade, we call them the Disappeared. And the worst of it is, you can’t even remember their names  . . . But I wasn’t worried. I wanted the chance to get back to acting, though Julian said I shouldn’t diversify. (Sometimes, I’m afraid he thinks I’m a one-talent girl, which is rubbish.) I’d been talking about a role in a new period drama for the BBC when Crusty called. Crusty is Pan’s name for the