It has been a week and some since we came back from the coast and the big, blue sea, and in this week and some I have worked and looked for work and then worked some more. I am getting the swing of this freelance thing, I think – the principle, I see now, is to get more £15-an-hour work and less £7-an-hour work. Very good.

When I go for talks or read articles by freelancers about how to achieve a freelance lifestyle, they inevitably say, “People always ask me if I work in my pyjamas.” “No!” they say, “I do not!” they say, and we, we are a good audience, we chuckle politely. No one ever asks me if I work in my pyjamas, but I’ll tell you right now, I do. It is great. Number one, it cuts down on laundry – and every expense is taken into account when you are a freelancer and there is no regular pay cheque. Number two, I have great pyjamas. Number three, working in pyjamas doesn’t make me forget how to spell or when to use an en dash, so what’s the problem? I should throw a networking party for freelance writers and editors, and everyone should come in their pyjamas.

The freelance lifestyle, even at £15 an hour, is really not bringing in the big bucks, but it does mean that some days, like today, I can sit in the sun with my feet on the radiator and read the new Michael Ondaatje over lunch. I am only on page 14 and already it is a glorious book, Divisadero, and not just because the title reminds me of a Rilo Kiley song.

Lunch in the sun is deeeluxe, and fresh walnuts in a spinach salad is double deluxe. I am still banging away at the walnuts Maud brought last month from her walnut tree. We have no nutcrackers today, so I use a hammer. It is a small hammer, but it is a hammer nonetheless, and the other night when I was bang-bang-banging my way through a pile of walnuts, Olive said, “Now that is going to wake the neighbours.” It was only nine-thirty though, and he is clearly a backseat walnut cracker happy to avail himself of the spoils of walnut war, so I kept bang-bang-banging away till we had a good half-bowl of them.

The goal, by the way, is not just to get the walnut out of there, it is to get a whole walnut out of there. This does not happen unless I am alone with no one to witness my success. “Can I get,” I say, and maybe the mice are listening, “a hallelujah.”

What is great about these walnuts is that they are the same but different. Let me explain. Me, I like things that are the same but different. Like a row of jellies in the cooler, or like triplets, or like a small basket of stripey squash at the Saturday market. The walnuts, unshelled on my plate, are all shades of walnut – light and dark and in between. Their veins are light and dark and in between. Sometimes the veins running in the nut are so light they can hardly be seen. I will be so bold as to say no two walnuts are alike. I cracked one shell open and the walnut in there was striped like a tiger.

(A tiger?)

Yes.