Loop it up again, if you can, then rub the garlic-chilli-herbs-ginger-lemon mixture into the chicken skin; into the legs, the thighs, the wings. Come on,’ he said, and we went into the kitchen together, and I made this, late at night, and we ate it at midnight, with wine, and bread, and our fingers, sopping up the garlicky juices from the baking tray, sucking the bones.

She cooks Leftovers Pie for her new housemate, because she loves her; Crisis Cardamom Coffee Banana Bread, because everyone made banana bread at the start of lockdown; Turkish Eggs, because Jim would have hated them and he’s no longer there to object.Dinner parties, and Saturday afternoons in the kitchen, and lazy breakfasts, and picnics on the heath; evenings alone with a bowl of soup, or a heavy pot of clams for one. It was the first story I ever wrote about food, and it begins with a chicken in a cloth bag hanging on the back of a kitchen chair.

I am very bad at testing when a chicken is done, but I know in theory – something about sticking a skewer into the meatiest bit of the leg and the juices running clear. I cook the way other people run, or do yoga: a daily, meditative practice where I concentrate on something other than myself. Perhaps, I thought, lying on the hall floor, I will just stay on the hall floor forever, and sink through the laminate, and into the concrete, and down into the earth.This may have looked like a cookbook, but what it is really is an annotated list of moments worth living for. She spent years of her life as Jim’s caretaker, guiding him through chemotherapy and all its accompanying horrors, rendered “subservient, essentially, in a way no other adult relationship demands.