Oh, but I hadn’t forgotten about the cupcakes, cupcake!

I just ran out of time, and then the week was upon me, and the idiot project with the one-day “critical” deadline that I skipped lunch hours and stayed late to finish, day after day, to meet this one-day critical deadline that moved, day after day, until a week after I was first given the project, and there it was, still, large, a beached whale of a project on my desk, and it occurred to me, not for the first time, that the phrase “critical deadline” might not mean anything to a boss who spells the word “intergrated”.

“I can’t talk about work anymore,” I’d said to the kids when they were over for dinner Thursday night, “because it just makes me live the aggravation all over again.” We were sitting at the table, and Sweden and Paraguay were on in the other room—just in case—and we had plates of baked trout, and shitake mushroom soba, and a hope-for-the-best broad bean salad with grilled asparagus and tomatoes, and Finchley seemed very far away.

The trout—do you know how to bake trout? Because me, not so much, but I’d figured I’d give it a go anyway, and if it didn’t work out then (a) there’d be shitake mushrooms and soba for all! and (b) that’d just get us to the cherry clafouti quicker. “So maybe 200-degrees-celsius?” I said, to John, maybe, or to no one in particular, and set the oven. And Emily laid the trout out on the foil, and we popped it in. “And maybe five minutes?” I said, to Nai, maybe, or to no one in particular, and Nai obligingly timed us. Some minutes later, Nai and I were sitting on the floor in front of the glowing oven door while I wrung my hands and wailed, “It’s not cooking!” Everyone came and crowded round, then, and Marc opened the door and peered inside, and said, “It’s hot, and it’s cooking.” “How long has it been in there?” he said, and I said, “Six minutes?” It is possible, but I am not sure if I’m projecting, that he snorted.

And I forget now how long it took altogether, which means the next time I do this I will have to go through the whole rigmarole, but let’s say something like seventeen minutes, with a minute—or until you get tired counting to sixty—under the broiler to make the skin crisp up, call me Nigella. Henny was in charge of the plating line—“Fish!” she’d call, or “Parsley!”—and then we were six around the table, hungry-like.

I discovered, a couple of weeks ago, that it is possible to have people over to dinner during the week—all it takes is leaving the office when I’m actually supposed to leave the office. I was so tired this week, so beat down by the little idiocies of the people who pay my salary, but then Thursday night there were the windows open at home, and Henny’s lilac and cream foxgloves in a vase by the sill; the summer night on the wing while the bubbly fizzed and giggled in our flutes. And we laughed, we beat on the table and laughed, and Nai was saying how Indonesian people describe falling: “Pa-da-pa-da-pa-da-pa” and we furrowed our brows and looked at him funny and laughed.

“I’m full,” Marc said later, and I said, “Did you eat a donut?”, for when I’d greeted Nai at the door, he’d had a grin and a box of Krispy Kremes. “No?” he said, and he couldn’t look me in the eye. “You had two slices of cake and a donut,” Emily said, and Marc smiled a sugar smile.

But, oh, dessert fiends—the cupcakes, which I hadn’t forgotten, and which, still, I haven’t forgotten. There is a dedicated space in my mind for cupcakes, don’t you worry, and said space reminded me, last Saturday, as I texted the crew: “Picnic today, Saint James’s Park”, that once upon a time I’d read about cupcakes, and I thought, “’Sabout time a girl made a cupcake.” “There will be cupcakes,” I texted, because sometimes all it takes is saying a thing to make it happen, but for extra security I also crossed my fingers I’d find a cupcake tin in time.

There were cupcakes, then, for—you see?—you just need to say it, even with the boy and I waking up late, and our lazy breakfast; after considering the too-pricey picnic gear at Cath Kidston before tooling down to Shaftesbury to the discount wholesale-retail kitchen place; after being in the slowest slow queue at Tesco’s for chocolate powder; after a stroll through Soho and a sushi train lunch; after dropping in to say hello to Sherene and the Italian watching the football over the largest beer glasses in the world; while the boy took a siesta downstairs, I put on the Mosquitos and the cupcakes came to life. Thank you, Saffron!, truly, if there is something you know, it is cupcakes.

Here is Saturday afternoon: We were in the park, me and Olive, on a big white tablecloth under a tree. There were ducks. Seung Yun rang. “We are near the lake,” I said. “By the Inn, under a tree,” I said, describing at least fifty other people, and I despaired a little. “I will come and get you,” I said. Jazon rang. “Come straight in on the right,” I said. “We are just past the group of naked men.” “Naked men,” he said, “I am writing it down.” Marc rang. “We are two-o’clock from the ICA,” I said. Marc rang again. “Yes,” I said, “two-o’clock.” When he and Emily finally showed up across the lawn, he said: “Those were terrible directions.” He said: “You are at least two-ten.” Dan rang. “I’m going to hand you over to Marc,” I said.

Jazon showed up though, easy as pie, and clearly it was the naked men that done it. When he opened his messenger bag to take out his camera and I saw what I saw, I said: “You brought me an US Weekly!” “Yes,” he said, and he put it in my hands, we like friends visiting from New York a lot, and we especially like Jazon a lot. US Weekly, here are my pals again, Lindsay and Britney and Jake, none of this Jordan business, this Peter Andre business, these footballers’ wives.

We lounged on one blanket and another and another, half in the sun and half out, and it was blue and green all around like summer. And Emily’d made these things, these filo pastry things, with tomatoes and cheese and things, and later, when I asked her to pass me a wheaten biscuit, she made me one with Boursin and tomato boobs. And the cupcakes, the cupcake part of my brain whispers—and it’s true, there were the cupcakes as well, dark chocolatey and orangey and gingery, and the geese had left the lake and were closing in on them, too. It was four o’clock, then five, and six, and seven, and on, and the sun was still up, and it was still summer.

“Footy and pims with the boys?” Nai’d texted me earlier, and I’d said “See how lah”, but it was clear, as we shook the grass off our blankets, that we were heading to meet him in Bayswater. We were leaving the park and Emily said, “I like your walk.” “My walk,” I said, and it was as much a think as a question. “Your walk,” she said, “you have a chewing-gum walk.” “A ch—” “Wriggly,” she said, and she swayed her hips.

At Panos’s, there was salt and pepper squid, and Four Seasons duck and char siu rice, and we made lemonade Pimm’s with strawberries in a stock pot on an unlit stove. We were many in a small room around a small television, and Panos was swearing in Greek, and I yelled at the screen: “Come on, blue-haired guy!” We wanted the Côte d’Ivoire to win, at least Jazon and I did, because I liked the orange costumes, and Jazon wanted to feel the goosebumps from football uniting a nation at war.

We were outside on the balcony afterwards, and it was night by now, cool, and we smelled like the sun. We were picking at leftover picnic cherries, and Emily was tying a knot in a cherry stem with her tongue, and I said, because sometimes I feel like bragging, “I can spit a cherry seed really far.” And I remembered that when I was at the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes the other day, with a cloud of candy floss larger than my head, that Olive had spit his cherry seed farther than mine—it was indisputable, the two seeds sitting in the dust—but I thought I would keep that on the DL.

Saturday night, we couldn’t see the arc of the cherry seed as it hurtled toward the ground, but we heard it hit the metallic blue bonnet of a parked car. We waited for the car alarm to ring out, but there were only our muffled laughs, and the moon a silent circle in the sky.