So lazy I have been! So slow in the mornings, so crawly-out-of-bed! What little discipline structures my day-to-day was carried away on the winter wind while CC and I traipsed around Paris and London in search of hot chocolates and sticky cinnamon rolls. “Back to work!” I said to myself and the mice when she left a couple of weeks ago. I called around for freelance bits while I searched the job ads again. I answered mail, I vacuumed, I grocery-shopped. I did a lot of laundry. I baked brownies. This was the first day. Later came the maple syrup cake showered with shattered pecans. Later, still, the shortcakes.

(The mice, meanwhile, licked all the peanut butter off the mousetrap.)

These past two weeks have found me in a curious no-zone between one big vacation and another. It was not so long ago that we held high glasses of champagne while the Eiffel Tower fizzed in the night. This weekend in Singapore, we will be planning another New Year’s Eve dinner, visions of niangaos dancing in our heads.

I have decided, incidentally, that this is the year I learn to cook Chinese properly. I’d always assumed that being Chinese meant Chinese cookery would come naturally. It turns out that having a bottle of oyster sauce in the fridge does not a Chinese chef make.

I started small last night with a steamed sea bass and bai cai in a garlic sauce – nothing fancy, but these are the foods that taste of a home. Prepped, the minced garlic, sliced ginger and chopped spring onions on the cutting board made, already, for a fragrant apartment. Afterwards, the steam puffed out from under the aluminium cover on the wok and then we ate the fish off the bone. We spooned the fried garlic-soy sauce-shaoxing rice wine gravy onto tender meat. It tasted like accomplishment and celebration.

“You should call your mother,” Olive said. You know, I almost did.