Madeleine Silver

There are signs: a Wimbledon towel in the downstairs loo. Another, faded, in a child’s swimming bag. Maybe a Links of London strawberry charm lingering in the jewellery box. All not-that-subtle clues of a hazy student summer spent working at the All England Lawn Tennis Club.  For two weeks swathes of impossibly well-spoken university students (Edinburgh, Durham, Bristol, Newcastle…) descend on Wimbledon to serve up Pimm’s, flog tennis racquet-shaped key rings, escort players – and clean loos. It’s the summer job to trump all summer jobs.

There is a moment in former Condé Nast maestro Nicholas Coleridge’s memoir The Glossy Years where he recounts losing his magazine virginity. Aged 16 and ill in bed at home he picked up a copy of Harpers & Queen belonging to his mother and in an instant was spellbound: the wit, the glamour, the ‘understated snobbery’. ‘That first couple of hours with a glossy changed my life,’ he wrote.  So I felt when Vogue was delivered to my school library each month: a sliver of high-end bliss among the daily-end drudgery. It was the start of a teenagehood marked by circles of shame in Heat and sticky ink on my thighs from reading Grazia on sweaty school coaches (temporary tattoos of gossip).

There’s one safe bet at any Olympic Games: there will always be a generous handful of Millfield alumni on Team GB. At Tokyo there were 13 Old Millfieldians (OMs); in the previous Games in Rio there were eight; four years before that, on home turf, there were nine (two of whom won gold). In 2016 the tally of OMs at the Games was higher than Pakistan’s entire delegation. In 2012 they won the same number of gold medals as Canada. What is Millfield’s secret? How did this independent boarding and day school, tucked away in an unfashionable corner of Somerset, far from the Notting Hill brigade, become a sporting powerhouse? ‘The philosophy is not about creating Olympians. It’s about creating a lifelong relationship with sport’ The obvious answer is its sprawling facilities.

When the University of Cambridge’s vice-chancellor Stephen Toope told the Times that students’ gap year projects abroad can build less resilience than the everyday lives of students from modest backgrounds, he was of course right. In today's culture, the three months I spent attempting to teach English in southern Malawi in the late Noughties now feel like a dirty secret of over-privilege; something that’s deserving of the same discretion as having a childhood pony or the fact that you spent the Easter holidays in the Alps.

There are moments in life that serve as a wake-up call to adulthood. Perhaps, the first was sitting in the beige office of a mortgage broker, wondering how my soon-to-be-husband and I had made the leap from meeting on a sweaty Durham dance floor to this airless room in Holborn. More recently, it was looking around a primary school for our four-year-old-son. Mindlessly staring at wall displays of woodland animals, you’re racking your brains as to how you will finish work at 3pm for pick up come September and scramble enough childcare for a six-week summer holiday. Goodbye 52-week-a year nursery.  But book yourself enough tours at enough schools, and you swiftly find yourself in the swing of things.

Savvy planning can negate succumbing to a sad Ginsters sandwich and insipid service station coffee as you hit the road and criss-cross your way around the UK this spring. Of course, there are the A-grade service stations run by the Westmoreland family (at Gloucester on the M5, Cairn Lodge on the M74 and Tebay on the M6). This trio has revolutionised our expectation of a motorway stop and are worth letting your petrol gauge hit the red for: no Burger King, proper coffee and farm shops heaving with local pies, pickles and preserves. But plot carefully and there are other lesser known foodie stops that make the prospect of a day spent in the car a little more enticing, from fish trucks and bakeries to hidden cafes and upmarket diners, all on the road or just a short diversion away.

Not even a pillowy panettone or the most lethal of brandy butters can beat the thud of a round robin letter on the doormat. It’s that perfect concoction of mundane detail (how the electric car is faring) and low-level bragging (news of a child’s Oxbridge acceptance letter) that make them so tantalising, the ultimate yuletide indulgence. You simultaneously snigger at how on earth this distant relation could think you’d be interested in the trials and tribulations of their daughter's grade eight trumpet exam, while combing through it with the diligence of a lawyer. If our Instagram addiction has taught us anything, it’s that we are, after all, interested in the seemingly irrelevant status updates of day-to-day life. And here it is in its purest form.