Thursday the gas engineer arrived and fixed the boiler. I wanted to give him a round of applause. It’d been hairy there for a while. The Saturday of turning the gas off was fine with two layers of clothes, the Sunday was fine-ish with three layers of clothes and a blanket, the Monday I sat at my desk and, with fingers of ice, marked up a manuscript in red. I don’t think it was till Tuesday that we cracked, and Olive went to Argos for an electric heater.

My mum called and said, “I just wanted to make sure you were both still alive.”

“I’m getting up the courage,” I said, “to get into the shower.”

“Aiyah!” she said, “no need to shower lah!” This is the long-practising medical professional whose mantra, oft-heard in my childhood upon returning home from wherever, was Say kah say chiew!, or, Wash feet wash hands! As if we had gone chasing monkeys in the mud jungles of Singapore, and not, I dunno, fifteen minutes up the road to Mrs Khoo, the piano teacher. The path, once in the front door, was straight for the bathroom and the cleansing powers of water and Lux soap.

“No need to shower lah!” she said, and suggested instead: “Just wipe.”

There were other problems. No gas meant no cookery, save for in the oven or the microwave. I know some people can work magic in a microwave, but I am not one of those people. There is a microwave in the house because it came with the house. I might sometimes use it for desperation defrosting, but it is mostly off at the mains like the silent, dour teenager of the kitchen family. And the oven – I know what you are thinking, poppets, but contrary to popular belief, there can be too much cake.

I was on the phone with CC and I was under two blankets. This was the third day after the gas man cometh to turn the gas off at the meter. I was running out of ideas of oven-cooked food. “I think I’m going to make an eggplant tart,” I said. “Maybe with feta?”

“Maybe,” she said, “mozzarella, and maybe proscuitto.” “And maybe,” she said, “pesto. Just a little.” “Dollops,” she said, “on the top.”

“Okay!” I said.

We were eating the tart at dinner – it was everything it promised to be! The eggplant bitey! The mozzarella like clouds of cheese! The thinly-sliced proscuitto and dollops of crema di carciofini on the tart hot out of the oven! – and I was musing on how frozen puff pastry had changed my life. “No, really,” I said, “you can put anything on here and it’ll be good!” “You know what would be really good?” I said, and I was excited because I could almost taste it. “Mascarpone,” I said, “and figs, and honey drizzled on the top.”

“I really don’t respect at all mascarpone,” Olive said, and he may have shrugged. “Except in tiramisu,” he said. “It is,” he said, “a useless cheese.”