“I conned you into making us dinner,” I e-mailed Emily, and it was true, too, even though I hadn’t planned it. I’d asked her to dinner this weekend, but the girl is going to be weekending in Paris. “Come over Tuesday night,” she offered instead, so I said, “OK!”

I started volunteering at a non-profit this week, an advocacy group for sustainable food and agricultural policies, and all day yesterday I researched England’s orchards for a report on how we like them apples – apples in Herefordshire, apples in Cumbria, apples in Somerset, apples in the mid-Kent Downs. It was a slow start, as I tried to figure out where these counties even are. By mid-afternoon, I’d started on a damson project, too, but the damage was done, and I was hankering, hard, after a slice of apple pie.

“All I’m saying,” I wrote Emily, in response to her telling me not to bring anything, “is that I’m going to stop in Euphorium after work, just to see.”

I know you know.

Emily was slicing potatoes when I arrived. I held a box, and the box held a bitter chocolate tart, a glossy banana tart and a slice of apple pie.

“Where exactly,” I said later, reading the label on the box of yellow chanterelles, “is Belarus?” Bee-LAR-ruhs, I said, and I will remind you that as the nine-year-old director of the class play, I’d once said, with authorité, “Who wants to be Penelope?” Pen-uh-lope, I’d said then, and last night I said Bee-la-rus. Emily stopped making the dauphinois to come over and look at the label. She was still holding her knife, and she laughed very loudly.

Em and Marc are moving to Paris before the year is out, too early for me and Olive to finish off our lease and charm their rasta landlord into letting us take over their dirt-cheap apartment on the Regents Canal. “Oh, Emily,” I said. She was squeezing half a lemon onto the fish, a flat, silvery bream surrounded by cherry tomatoes in yellow and red. The candy-coloured cupcake moulds were drying on the rack. “Emily,” I said, “What am I going to do when you move to Paris?” “Come and visit,” she said. We want her to move to Paris and open a cupcake shop on the Canal Saint Martin. There will be a small room above the bakery for when I go visit. A small room has small windows, and the curtains will be white with red stripes, like dish towels. They may even be dish towels. There will be a small windowsill, for one cupcake. Maybe two.