My husband and I have always loved eating, but neither of us were much for cooking. In our twenties, we lived on take-out Pad Thai, Peek Freans and the pasta recipes Jason picked up while living in Italy. The odd chicken thigh landed in our oven when we had children, (the oven was previously storage for shoes) and we both became a dab hand at eggy bread and smashed bananas. In the last few years, we could always count on a flavourless filet of salmon and a floret or two par-cooked broccoli if I was cooking. Occasionally, I’d knock it out of the park with, no, I can’t finish that sentence. Everything I made was dull as dishwater. The good food, the food that excited us, came from eating out; Giulietta’s polpe e fagioli, Bar Raval’s serrano and shishitos, Donna’s rice and shrimp, Sakai Bar’s Oshinko pickles. And then Covid came into our lives, and well, our lives got turned upside down, and Jason started to cook. And when I say cook, I mean bake bread. Stuff and grill whole fish. Make bone broth and Bolognese from scratch. Homemade Tahini, coming up. Jason has cooked a meal everyday (minus the odd take-out Sunday) since last March. A good meal. A balanced meal. A meal with colour and imagination. He follows recipes, some passed down by his grandmothers, and others that he’s found online. Feeding his family has been centering, purposeful. As Julia Child put it, “I think careful cooking is love, don’t you?”

I write everyday, even on days when I have nothing to say. Which lately, is often. I figure the daily exercise will come in handy when I do have something say. Some days, all I can muster is a sentence or two about a kettle or a chair, or the Rowntree’s jelly cubes I used to eat straight out of the packet on the school bus. Even the bus driver looked at me oddly when I’d bring them out of my lunchbox. I think he asked me to put them away once lest my sticky fingers ruined his moquette upholstered seats. “But your hair will shine,” my Mum used to say when I’d tell her about the peculiar looks. It’s funny what we remember. And what we write about. When we have nothing to say.