1. The deliciousness of the houmous takes me by surprise.

2. The cluster of oak leaves are such a flat brown that they look fake.

3. After scaring the crap out of me with coughing fit at dinner time, Lily perks up again, hunting for her bonio and pushing around her food cube like she’s the healthiest (albeit oldest) pup in the world.

4. I try out different drafting techniques – each one becomes my favourite for a short while. I’m sure I’ll settle down eventually but for now, my hands and wrists benefit from doing different things.

1. After several failed experiments I don’t have much hope that the coffee will work but it does.

1b. She tells us about being a teenager – in the so-called first generation of teenagers – and how she thought the arrival of the pill a few years later brought with it not freedom but greater expectation: “before then, if they touched your left breast, they’d be happy for six months”.

1c. The dots are perfectly circular and well spaced. (The next round is neither.)

2. I rub the dog’s ears then her chest until she is utterly blissed out.

2b. The soft nudge of a washing cat’s head against my leg.

3. Every time I’ve left the studio today, Shipley has smelled wonderful – a spicy aroma floating up the hill from the curry restaurants on the lower road. When I get home, the house smells the same way – but this time I get to eat the food too.

1. Kaufman sits between me and my keyboard and purrs loudly. Then, having grown weary of my affections, he makes his way across the desks to John for Round 2.

2. I stroke M-dog’s velvety ears as R shows me the orange of his squash. (Which isn’t a euphemism.)

2b. The satisfying tear as the short rooted grass peels back off the stones.

2c. I am dogless for once and I am rewarded by a very fluffy, pretty white cat coming to say *blink*.

2d. I start work on recovering another long bed at the allotment, and it is only when I step back that I realise it’s the penultimate one. What seemed like a mammoth task went better than I thought. (That said, there is still the side bed to recover, and the berry bed beyond the greenhouse, and around the bean frame, and I want to make two square beds either side of the pond … but at least I’m nearly there on the long beds.)

3. While I’m cooking dinner, between us, we utter the phrases “there’s no salad, but there’s cake” and “there’s no cheese, well, there’s just three types of cheese”. The source of our flab is not surprisingly.

3b. Another one of those leftover dishes that is almost better than when it was fresh.

3c. Creamy rice pudding.

1. My afternoon throwing session goes brilliantly. After lots of recent collapses, I go back to basics to start with and am rewarded by a series of lovely pots. Even the chores at the end – reclaiming some old clay for next time – goes well: it’s not overly wet like last time, and slops together into soft, silky lumps.

2. My spinning goes well too: I think I’ve worked out all the mechanical kinks and I spin for an hour without issue. The yellow silk in the mix streaks the dusky pinks with interest.

2b. My treadle leg wobbles under me as I walk back downstairs. I liken it on Twitter to getting off a bike after a long ride but it’s more like those outdoor gym moonwalk things: I stagger around, laughing at the sensation.

3. The autumn sun is low and golden, the path is striped with its glow.

0. The mist is heavy on the back – a solid wall of fuzz from just beyond the ditch. The dawn light streaks it with gold and pink.

0b. At the other end of the day, the mist clouding the distant hills – the ones beyond Halifax, the ones beyond Brighouse, the ones beyond Bradford – is stained by the sunset. The sun hangs round and heavy, a peach mirrored disc that eventually seems to give in to gravity.

1. We watch the Red Arrows again – just from the bedroom window this time. They – and their trails – are a lot starker today, standing out from the blue sky rather than blurring into the clouds. They mostly stay as a group out over the beach, over the paying crowds, but every now and then one breaks free and comes thundering across so close that we can see its markings.

2. Bacon butties.

3. The beach is busy – everyone enjoying the last of the sun with just the occasional World War 2 fighter plane or bomber passing over to keep things interesting. Lily runs between us in the shallows then sits at John’s feet to stare at him and will him to give her another treat. (She has forgotten that I’m the one with the pocketful of gravy bones.)

3b. We return to the hill near my old school to watch a few more planes. Afterwards, I turn around look at the buildings and try to figure out what was where. I also point at the strip of grass just on the other side of the fence and explain how I remember learning about the speed of sound right there – it seems a fitting memory given the sound/visual discrepancies we’ve experienced watching the planes.

3c. John giggles and giggles at the solar-powered dancing flower.

4. On a whim, on our way home, we loop around the fire we’d been watching from the conservatory. The little village is across the fields from my mum and dad’s house (albeit two miles across the fields) but if I’ve ever been there before, it was perhaps three decades ago. We pass through it and down Moss Lane, watching the hay burn.

1. Dozens of straw bales stacked high in a block of pleasing dimensions. As we approach, it seems like a perfectly straight line but as we curve around, we can see that it’s banana-ed.

2. By coincidence, we’re in Southport during the Air Show weekend. We arrive just in time for the Red Arrows first display, which we watch from the edge of the dunes next to my old school. (It is only when we return the next day that I realise how strange it is that everyone there gathers on the same hill, when there are plenty of equally good spots nearby.) I’m as excited about the happy springer running around in the distance as the multi-million pound planes zipping by overhead.

2b. Afterwards, we walk towards the dunes but veer off to the left, taking an easier flat walk than struggling through the sand. We pass between the golf course and the backs of gardens, before reaching the road of expensive, but surprisingly cramped close together, houses.

2c. The afternoon’s walk around town is marked by aircraft: a huge helicopter circles as we walk up past the fair, the absolutely terrifying roar of the Typhoon (made all the worse by the sound echoing around the relatively built up area) and finally the acrobatic light planes that were perfectly framed as we looked up Coronation Walk on our walk back to the car. (The latter were the only ones that it was possible to enjoy guilt-free: the only ones we saw not intended to rain down death from above.)

3. Watching through the obscured window as an excited Lily runs around my mum, saying hello and hurrah, I’m glad you’re all home again.