It sounds an idyllic conjunction of smart new houses and bucolic charm, though the fields were probably pegged with people’s washing and the mud, in wet weather, must have got everywhere; no wonder so many old houses have boot scrapers built into their walls. Since then the nearest countryside may have receded by fifteen to twenty miles, but if you have an architectural eye then you can still clearly distinguish the old urban boundary, beyond which the houses are generally late eighteenth-century and Victorian.

Today, of course, Great Ormond Street is most famous for its children’s hospital, which fills the northern side of the street and extends as far back as boring Guilford Street beyond. When I first moved in, last December, I was slightly worried that my view would be of poor sick children on the wards, but  fortunately, I suppose, the block directly opposite is largely an administrative one.

All the same, the street is still notable for the number of children being pushed back and forth by anxious or determinedly cheerful parents, and the road is crowded with ambulances – though because there’s no accident and emergency wing and, I guess, because of the children, they tend to drive slowly and quietly; another lucky break. Still, the thought of all that unhappiness can be quite depressing, and though I remind myself that the hospital is there to make these children better, at times it can still feel a rather sad street. When I told a friend where I was moving she said, ‘I couldn’t bear to live there – I spent three months with my first child in Great Ormond Street.’

This corner of Bloomsbury has a long and distinguished connection with infants. Just up the road, at the top of Lambs Conduit Street, stood the grand eighteenth-century buildings of the Foundling Hospital. Founded by retired shipbuilder Thomas Coram in 1739, it was the first children’s home in the country, taking in unwanted children and ‘foundlings’ – children abandoned in the street. The hospital fed and dressed them, giving them an education and  a new start in life. It was a private charity, supported by the great and the good, and it became something of a fashionable cause in eighteenth-century London; among its most notable patrons were Hogarth and Handel, who gave regular organ recitals in its chapel and who bequeathed, among other things, his score of Messiah.

Dickens was another regular visitor in the following century, but in 1926 the organisation moved away from the smoke and smog of London, leaving its great halls echoing and empty. A developer called James White bought the buildings and, despite widespread public outcry, in 1928 everything was demolished apart from the entrance screen on Guilford Street. A few years later the Hospital would probably have survived, but at least the site was never built over, and some of the finest artefacts were saved (they can be seen in the adjoining Museum, opened in 2004). Today the foundations lie under floodlit football courts, but the vast forecourt, once busy with gaily painted phaetons, still echoes with children’s voices, for since 1936 it has been a public park, to which – as a sign announces at the entrance – ‘adults may only enter if accompanied by a child’.

Acer pseudoplatanus, to give the tree its proper botanical name, is also responsible for many of those deeply irritating ‘leaves on the line’ excuses that railway companies give out each autumn to explain why their trains are running late. Worst of all, from a perfume perspective, they don’t even really smell of much, though their leaves do have the faintest leathery scent and their wood, once dried enough, burns with a pretty generic woodsmoke smell.

So is Sycomore just an example of misguided marketing, like Ralph Lauren’s dreadfully named Glamourous? Actually, no. Coming from arguably the world’s most tightly policed brand, its name will have been very carefully considered – and actually it almost certainly refers not, as I’d initially thought, to Acer pseudoplatanus at all but to a rather more exotic tree, the so-called Sycomore fig. Ficus sycomorus (to use its Latin name) is a large, spreading tree that grows all over the Middle East, where its heavy shade is much appreciated; it was known to the Egyptians as the Tree of Life. It’s a tree I haven’t sniffed, but my guess is that it shares at least some of the dry, green, slightly fruity scent that we know from other varieties of fig – though ironically there’s only the faintest hint of figginess in Sycomore.

Anyhow, enough about the name. What makes Sycomore extraordinary, for me, is a trick it seems to be able to do that no other perfume I’ve come across seems to be able to do. This is to smell like two completely different scents, depending on whether you smell it close up or at a distance. Up close it has the strong, earthy, pleasantly bitter scent of vetiver, the root of an Indian grass that’s related to lemongrass and citronella. It’s also grown commercially in the Caribbean, and apparently Chanel’s super-high-quality vetiver originated in Haiti.

Vetiver is usually classed as one of the great masculine fragrances, presumably because of its bracing bitterness and lack of cloying sweetness; it’s certainly not a flowery smell. But it also has a warmth and – get this – a touch of smokiness that gives it extra depth and complexity, especially when it’s surrounded by such a delicious cushion of other scents, which mix smokiness with a slightly sweeter touch of fruit. Vetiver is also famous for its staying power, and a spritz of Sycomore can last you all day.

It’s the added fruitiness that, on occasion, one gets a whiff of when someone wearing Sycomore strolls by, and then it’s like a different, warmer, sweeter fragrance altogether, with hardly a hint of the vetiver that dominates the perfume on the skin. If it’s an intentional trick I’m in awe, though it seems perfectly possible, given that Sycomore was created by Chanel’s chief nose Jacques Polge in collaboration with Christopher Sheldrake, the legendary British perfumer who has been Chanel’s director of research and development since 2005.

Like the other fragrances that belong to Les Exclusifs de Chanel, Sycomore costs about twice as much as your average perfume, but it does come in a typically (for Chanel) handsome bottle, beautifully presented in a chunky white-and-black box. The hidden magnet in the heavy black cap, ensuring that the iconic twin Cs of the  Chanel logo always end up perfectly aligned, is a particularly nice touch, even if it has since been adopted by one or two other brands.

Though it’s a classically masculine scent Sycomore is (quite rightly) marketed as a unisex fragrance, and like most men’s perfumes it can smell wonderful on a woman. Yet what I love most is that, from the very first sniff, it has a wonderful feeling of luxury, quality and depth, which are things that are all too often lacking in other perfumes. And who could resist its baffling cleverness, like a cryptic crossword in scent?

Yet the walk along the cliffs from here to the Bill, which we do most weekends, reminds me of all that’s astonishing about what another friend used to call This Septic Isle. The cliffs themselves are extraordinary, with the fifty-mile views out over Lyme Bay to the west and the rest of Dorset to the east; on a really clear day we can see Dartmoor in one direction and the Isle of Wight in the other.

Seeing St George’s church rising above the chaos of the Portland-stone quarries always startles me, and there are other, smaller things to treasure too: the fulmars nesting on the ledges beneath Blacknor Point, gurgling to each other all summer and taking short, circular flights out from their nests; the beautifully finished base of a Second World War searchlight position, whose perfectly arced curve throws back an uncanny echo in the open air. Even more magical, for me, are the miraculously preserved ripples in an area of fossilised beach, now two hundred feet above the waves whose ripples they echo, only from millions of years ago. Talk about echoes from the past…

Eau Sauvage is a scent I love, not just for its superb intrinsic quality but also for its history as the first modern men’s fragrance to have a strongly floral character, cleverly disguised by the herbal and citrus elements of a classic cologne. It was also one of the first perfumes I ever wore, so there’s an element of nostalgia to my affection too.

So when the last bottle ran out it seemed only natural to buy another – except that when I next sprayed some on it was blatantly obvious that there was something missing: namely a huge hole where the lemony part of the formula should have been. Yes, Dior (or rather Firmenich or whichever fragrance company makes the scent for them) has taken the original and reformulated it, in one of those secretive, below-the-belt moves that give the industry such a bad name.

These kinds of underhand tricks go on all the time, but it’s particularly annoying when it happens to an iconic fragrance – and particularly stupid when what’s been taken out is the citrus element that makes Eau Sauvage such a distinctive perfume in the first place; without it it’s a muted, muffled thing, with about as much appeal as a piece of damp felt.

I’ve learned my lesson, but Dior obviously haven’t learned theirs.

They’re both cheap, for one thing: with money so tight there’s no way I can afford a gym membership at the moment, but running costs hardly anything – just a decent pair of shoes and some old shorts; same with swimming – a pair of trunks and you’re away.

Yet there’s more to the similarities than that. Running give me an exhilharating sense of freedom – the feeling that somehow you can go anywhere, in a way that you’d feel awkward if you walked: down dead-end streets, round courtyards and parking lots, through twisting passages and  alleyways, into areas you don’t know and have never been before. It’s a wonderful way of exploring the city around you, and I’ve surprised myself in going so far – round St Paul’s Cathedral, Tate Modern, Bermondsey, Trafalgar Square, through the City, even as far as the Gherkin one day.

Harder to define is how physically similar the experience of swimming and running can be: once you get into your stride there’s even a similar sense of bouyancy somehow. Even more than that, as I shouldered my way as nimbly as I could the other day through crowds of commuters emerging from Farringdon tube, I could have been shouldering my way through the waves as they fell on Chesil Beach. Strange meeting indeed.

Or perhaps I’m just not being imaginative enough? That’s perfectly possible, but it also raises an interesting point, which is what an iron grip the perfume licensees have over the way their products are pictured and advertised.

Like wine or music, perfume doesn’t, in itself, have much (if any) innate visual appeal, and perfume bottles, though far more varied in design than bottles of wine, are often so hideous to contemplate that it’s kinder not to illustrate them at all. Take the unutterably hideous Womanity from Thierry Mugler, for example… (NB I mean ‘take’ in a physical rather than a metaphorical sense – as in please, please take it a very long way away and never bring it back.)

The only drawbacks are that it’s on the mainland (boo!), so we have to drive or cycle there – not very easy with a spade on your back. And though the soil is lovely and rich and deep, as soon as we started digging we discovered that it was infested with bindweed, brambles and couch grass.

So the last week, which we’d planned as a week off, has turned into an epic session of back-breaking digging; after four days of this I actually started dreaming about digging, which can’t be a good sign, but we finally finished last night – 60 square metres of digging done. Which means we can start planting tomorrow morning before heading back to London for a rest. Phew.

Britain has an extraordinarily rich heritage of traditional varieties of fruit and vegetables, but how many of us know the fascinating and sometimes eccentric stories behind them?

Who was the Mr Cox, for example, who gave his name to Cox’s Orange Pippin, now the most popular apple in the world? Which conference were Conference pears named after? Where do Victoria plums really come from? What is so mysterious about the apple called the Bascombe Mystery? What role did beetroot play in ending the slave trade, and how did gooseberries help Charles Darwin arrive at his theory of evolution? Who started the uniquely British love-affair with rhubarb and runner beans? When and where was growing potatoes illegal? And could the Spanish Inquisition have been responsible for our carrots being orange?

Forgotten Fruits is the first book to answer all these questions, bringing together the history of Britain’s fruit and vegetables, from their origins – some of them ancient, but others surprisingly new – to their influence, over the years, on British society, the changing attitudes towards the food we eat and, more recently, the reasons for their disappearance from our supermarket shelves.

Informative, entertaining and packed with intriguing insights into the past, Forgotten Fruits offers an entirely new way of looking at the history of British cooking, gardening and society. In it you will find onions named after islands, a tomato named after a yacht, an unknown variety of redcurrant discovered growing under a gooseberry bush, new kinds of apples found in gutters and on rubbish tips, even a parsnip named after a popular song.

Read an extract here…

Buy Forgotten Fruits

My problem? It’s that in all those hundreds of perfumes there are maybe three or four I’d want to buy another time, and they’re nearly always the ones I know and like already. Of all the hundreds of new launches every year, in other words, barely one or two are worth a second sniff, and most of them are (not to mince words) utterly vile.

There are occasional exceptions, but they’re pretty rare, and often unexpected: Paco Rabanne Black XS for Men, for example, which is ridiculously sweet but enjoyably silly and smells of strawberries (though it’s based on a variation on orange); or Marc Jacobs Bang – hideous advertising, hideous bottle, but actually not such a bad scent inside. But mostly it’s sniff and recoil in horror: why does anyone buy this stuff? Just because they’re told to? It doesn’t seem to make sense.

There again, maybe it was always this way: apart from sad exceptions it’s the good, on the whole, that tends to survive, while the rubbish and the dreadful is quietly dropped and disappears. And perhaps it was just the same in the 1920s or the 1950s. The difference, today, is that there are far too many launches, the industry having backed itself into an unprofitable corner where only the latest thing sells, but only because it’s the latest thing – and it’s all too quickly superceded.

A couple of weeks before, chatting to our friend Ben Pentreath at his beautiful house in Littlebredy, I’d mentioned that I was thinking about moving back to London in search of work, when Ben’s friend Will said, ‘How about Alexa’s flat above you? She’s just moved out.’ Our ears pricked up, as both Ben and Will live in fantastic flats in Bloomsbury owned, bizarrely, by Rugby School. The following day we were emailing their agent, the following week we saw it, and the day after we got back from Paris the keys were ours – talk about serendipity.

It’s a tiny attic flat, six flights up, on Great Ormond Street, directly opposite the children’s hospital and just a five-minute walk from the British Museum or the Renoir Cinema. Around the corner is Lamb’s Conduit Street, with its quirky little shops (and Starbuck’s); Charles Dickens lived for a while two streets away, and Dombey Street is round the corner too; all in all it’s one of the nicest areas of central London you could hope to live. We still can’t quite believe it’s ours, but I’m expecting that feeling will wear off fairly quickly once the bills start coming in.

A few days on a gently deflating blow-up bed later and it was time to battle back down to Dorset through the ice and snow again for Christmas: my mum’s first Christmas without my dad, so we headed over and stayed with her and had a great time – as she said the only depressing moments were reading the Christmas cards that said ‘our thoughts will be with you at this sad time’. We raised a glass of wine to my dad, and had a beautiful (if slippery) walk across the fields through the dazzling soft snow, long gone by the sea but still lying thick and deep and uneven in Blackmore Vale.

So the New Year arrives with an exciting new start, as I exchange the island for the city again: I can’t wait to be back.