It was pear season for a while there – according to Paul Waddington’s handsome Seasonal Food, it was medlar season and partridge season and mallard season, too – so what was a girl to do but buy in bulk and bake a pear cake? Two, even? This is a luscious book, with its photographs like Renaissance still-lifes of lobsters black and shiny (July), and round pumpkins coddled like fat babies in thick linen (October), and wild, dirt-flecked chanterelles (September) tumbling out of their waxed-paper bundle onto weathered wood. Still, mushrooms cavorting or no, the seasonal-food forecast for December looks bleak: there will be celery a-plenty, it turns out, and pheasant and woodcock. I may have to try to survive on red cabbage and Jerusalem artichokes for a month.

November flew by with giant wings that blocked the passing of time. How are we here, under the muted sky, and the pavements wet and cold every morning from overnight rain, and December coming down the lane?

There’s nothing like a little office work to pass the time; two weeks this month I spent in-house at a food magazine, trying to charm them into hiring me. The test kitchen was two doors down the hall, and every time you walked down the corridor to the toilet you smelled cake, or bacon, or cake again. My first day there I was roped into taste-testing honeys. My second day, well, I lose track, but one day there was a pea and salmon frittata on the counter, and another there was a golden fruit loaf. There were brownies one day, and a four-layer cake another, this one covered – I believe the word is enrobed – in a dark-chocolate ganache. On my last day I had to heat up five pizzas for the rest of the staff. I spent an hour in the test kitchen, its ovens a gleaming silver, its Corian countertops shiny and clean. I opened every door. Some cupboards held a shelf of flours, a shelf of sugars, a shelf – shelves, rather – piled precariously with baking tins and trays. Some cupboards turned out to be a fridge, others a packed freezer. One cupboard revealed an impressive spice selection standing at attention.

When I was not juggling pizzas or digging around in the magazine archives, I was sub-editing articles on ketchup, or pinning up thumbnail print-outs of glorious Italian and South African meals to the wall-sized flatplan, or reading five newspapers a day to cut out all the food-related stories. I was very well informed for a while. The ink washed off my fingers, but these, for better or for worse, are the stories that stuck: A seal swam from the Orkney Islands, in northern Scotland, to Spain. I believe the headline in the Telegraph included the phrase “Sun-loving seal”. An obese hedgehog (his name was George) was put on a strict exercise regime; a small treadmill was involved. The Japanese really like a rose beaujolais. This story I did cut out: The price of wheat went up. The price of a full English breakfast went up.

Those were some days in November. One November night, I remember, a Monday night, in the rain – it had rained all day and everything was wet; leaves were wet, people, dogs, newspapers lying crumped and sodden by the Tube exits; and the puddles reflected the streetlamps, themselves wet and dripping – in the rain we took quick steps to the Shepherds Bush Empire for the Rilo Kiley show. Inside, the disco ball was spinning and the curtain in the back was a fluid gold. When the show opened and Jenny Lewis took the mic in a black fedora, this one indie boy standing next to me – he was tall and skinny, with curly hair – smiled through a slowly falling tear.