Tuesday July 27th

Day 97

“We are back on line,” my husband says in the car, as he drives me to the foot-man-with- the-needles at 8.15 this morning.

I’m comforted. For three days I couldn’t post my blog - I felt the wobble in my daily link with ‘What’s Cooking?’, like a shiver in my gut. I could break it so easily with my always doubts.

Now my big toes are capped with white gauze bandages - giant silk worm cocoons. I don’t venture outside and pad round the house like a penguin. Then I make a nest on the sofa with a long to-do list of sitting-down jobs. My toes throb inside their soft protective hats.

We feast on small globe artichokes for lunch - three each. They open like spikey sage- green water lilies in the deep saucepan.

“I can’t believe I grew these,” says my husband as we pull off the leaves, one by one,

dipping the sweet bud base into mayonnaise, pungent with garlic so fresh and juicy that I can’t believe he grew that either.

We remember the artichoke lunch we had in France last month with our writing friends - sitting round a huge table on a hot mountain terrace, pulling and dipping our leaves, getting closer and closer to the delicate centre with its closed sea anemone lid - the last hairy layer on the journey its heart.