1. We didn’t see Kaufman last night so the first thing I do on Sunday is look for him. A telltale tail behind his curtain gives away his location.

2. Buttered noodles with pepper and chilli flakes have become my new dicky-tummy food.

3. The headlights and brake lights dissipate and sparkle on the bumpy glass.

3b. The two dogs wander around the pub, hoovering under all tables, oblivious to the performances taking place.

1. We find a great little place for lunch.

1b. Looking up at the crossing, we see the variation in the buildings along the street.

2. We go to the strange shop at the back of the arcade – I know it stretches back further than one would expect but I’m surprised by how far it extends upstairs too. There is all sorts in there.

2b. We could sit on the corner but instead, we walk a bit further to sit near the lake. A quirk of perspective makes it look like little tiny cars are driving at the people walking down the pier. Later, as we walk around the water on the way back to the car, I get a dog hug – all the others we’ve seen have been on leads but this one is allowed to come over and when I bend down to talk to her, she licks my face.

3. Crumpets with cheese and chilli sauce.

1. We make slightly better time than we thought so we have time to meander into the city via my old haunts instead. It’s funny how familiar and yet strange it at the same time: it feels like a lifetime ago now. (And I suppose it is: I was 18-20 when I lived there, and that was nearly 18 years ago now.) As we drive up my old street, I’m thrown for a second but then the next building confirms it. We drive back down and I laugh heartily when I realise that my final year home has been demolished.

1b. John points out something that largely escaped my attention while I was living there – and my mum’s attention to this day – how elaborately decorated the pubs are in the city. Through over-exposure, we’re quite numb to Victorian architecture but these buildings from slightly earlier, that somehow escaped bombing and redevelopment, are breath-taking.

1c. Out of the car, the size of St George’s Hall also blows me away for the first time. How many times I have been past there? How many times inside? I even spent a full day carrying boxes of “Welcome to Liverpool!” pamphlets up the steps – and yet I never noticed the vast size of the columns, the bulk of them so high above us.

2. Inside the museum, we look at banana-coloured beetles eating fruit and the shadows of ants carrying leaves along a rope. Then we touch ancient rocks and massive shells, and stagger under the weight of an elephant’s tooth before John tries the amazing microscope and we look at much, much smaller things instead. We also enjoy all the specimens in the drawers – not quite knowing what will be inside.

2b. The warren of a cafe.

3. The sunset behind the docks and the man who stops to explain the strange window in the ground.

3b. The restaurant is further up the road than I thought it would be – right up, near my old university building – but it gives me the chance to see the extent of the regeneration up there: I tell John of how it was near abandoned, how we’d walk further out of our way rather than going down there – and now look at it, with its stately painted homes and trendy restaurants.

3c. The best Mexican food we’ve had in a long, long time.

4. We don’t stay at the gig for that long but I’m glad we make the effort to go for even a short time: I’m glad to see another pocket of regeneration and also a drooling dog that walks its tail when I say hello.

4b. We drive up to Southport along the old Dock Road. Again, we marvel at the scale of things – the ships, the silos and the old warehouses.

1. More editing. I look back at the end of each section and am surprised by the amount of changes I’ve made.

2. I wind the wool into a ball: the colours are delightful.

3. The pizzas are a little too thin in the middle but the dough is delicious.

1. The orange flesh of the squash that I break open for the chickens.

2. The sharp pencil strikes through the crisp text. I enjoy killing my darlings.

3. I sniff the pot to make sure it’s the ground black pepper. I sneeze a confirmation.

3b. Handing me a yoghurt and getting sorbet for himself, John gets halfway through wondering what frozen yoghurt tastes like – as if he’s inventing a new thing – before he realises what he’s saying. We both laugh heartily.