Twenty years ago we visited Windsor Castle and the nearby grounds of Eton. Wish I could say that I remembered more about it, but memory fails. Maybe I’d seen too many palaces and other monumental edifices in the weeks and months before.

That December was relatively warm, which might help account for the greenness of the lawn.

But it wasn’t so warm that we didn’t need coats. The ducks and geese in the Thames.

I do remember looking into one of the rooms of the castle that had been completely blackened by the fire in 1992 (renovations wouldn’t be finished until later in the decade). But I don’t remember whether we were looking across a roped off area from the inside, or looking in through a window from the outside. Or maybe it was both. The fire had clearly done a lot of damage.