The thing about staying home to work, well, staying home to “work”, is that sometimes you end up sitting around waiting for a client to send the job he was going to send two days ago. Argh. It’s three in the afternoon on Friday and I still haven’t heard from him. This means, I think, that the job will slide in, quietly, almost – but not quite – bashfully, around six; I am gearing myself up to feeling PSYCHED! about working all weekend.

Staying home to work, today, has turned into staying home to run errands, which is itself not so bad. I have laundered, I have vacuumed, I have scrubbed the kitchen counters. I would’ve sung “It’s a Hard-knock Life”, but I forgot where I’d filed the rags and pigtails. Because I am not a Depression-era orphan, teatime will bring roasted chestnuts hot from the oven.

I do this thing, see, where I try not to turn on the radiator. The good, green life, you know – and the eye-on-the-gas-bill life as well. When the winter seeps in through the space in between the windowsills and our charming vintage (jiggly) windows, my smugness keeps me warm. Yes, Mowmy, are you reading?, it is true: the wind comes in sometimes. My mother visited over the summer; she told my sister, later, “The flat is so small.” I believe she may have been whispering, even though I am halfway around the world. “And their clothes are just hanging in the hallway,” she said, her voice likely still lowered, “as if they are immigrants.” Oh, my Mowmy!, do not fret, at least I have clothes – and you can be sure I am wearing them all so I don’t have to turn on the heat.

My point is, not turning on the heat sometimes means resorting to other ways to keep warm. Doing the dishes under warm water is a way to keep warm. A pot of tea is a way to keep warm. Roasted chestnuts hot from the oven is a very fine way to keep warm.

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.

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.