People making polite conversation ask me: “What’s it like living in Italy?” I am not good at polite conversation. “Well,” I start to drone, leaning on one hip and twisting a foot coquettishly to settle in for my monologue, “I’m always half here and half there, which, of course, means I’m sort of nowhere . . . because, the thing is . . . ”

I am (actually, now) on the train going back to London, a transient manifestation of my permanent mental state — half here, half there — my existence nebulous as the train churns through Europe, my son’s frighteningly laboured breathing somehow keeping pace with the rumble of the wheels on the tracks.

My children are both curled up on the couchettes, heads on starchy pillows. This is how you get to London from Italy, incidentally — by train, as Nature intended. No being treated like cattle, no hassle. Exciting, civilised, trundly. (Rail Europe: Florence-Paris, Paris-London. Easy.) Now that the kids are asleep I am “thinking” about things. My friend Olga, a Russian psychoanalyst, just came to stay. It rained incessantly. On her first morning sitting in front of the fire eating porridge (I think she had imagined a white beach and slices of fat watermelon) my husband came down with a dream for us.

“So, I was standing on these steps with Anna and she fell backwards and hit her head. She was unconscious but I thought probably not dead because she screamed as she fell.”

Olga raised her eyebrows. Later she referred to “murderous phantasies” (the “ph” is a shrinky thing to differentiate unconscious imaginings from straightforward fantasy — sex in the Oval Office with Barack Obama, say. . .). Me, I thought he was asking, via the dream, that I shouldn’t think too much, to knock the past on the head and to accept his new Dream Man personality unquestioningly.

Before managing to think anything, we are in Dijon and the children have their faces pressed against the window. “Hey, remember when you fell off the high bed?” my son says to his sister. Hope was 2 and hurtled down from above with a suicidal schlomp. They jog each other’s memories a lot and it must make them sure, unlike me (I always thought I was the first person to do anything, that all my foundations were flimsy), that the past was true.

I realise, as the trilingual carriage man (“Hello, bonjour, buongiorno”) comes in with hot croissants (loaded at Dijon) that though I am neither here nor there, neither in Italy nor London, neither rejecting nor fully accepting Dream Man, my children don’t share this sensation of floating on nothingness just because they are between destinations. They are right here, right now, covered in croissant flakes and grinning hot chocolate moustaches. Perhaps they are (miraculously) sane!None of this over-thinking drivel.

“What’s it like living in Italy?” people ask, leaning down sympathetically because abroad must be awful. My daughter does not need hitting over the head to stop her prevaricating. “I hate it,” she says. “I love London.”

Which is lucky, because we will be there in three hours.

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