There was a time in my twenties when Sunday evenings were spent in the pub. At the time, my friends and I all lived in a corner of Hackney, either a few paces from one another’s bedroom doors, or a 10-minute cycle away. I think I knew at the time how rare and fortunate this was; London is sprawling, and to make friendships last here is to acknowledge that sometimes you will spend longer travelling than you will socialising. My city years have been built from minutes on buses.

Those pub sessions became a kind of illogical comfort. We were usually hungover, and realised that the pints we were sinking would both assuage and extend this. But the pub had an open fire and we could shed the many layers we wore in our damp, unheated terraced houses. After a couple of hours, we’d jump on the bikes and return there, warmed through.

Church, lunch, bike rides and boredom; Sundays are a day that invite traditions. Now, we divvy the day into meals: sprawling, lazy breakfasts with Cerys on the radio, long lunches at friends’ houses or round the family table. When I was little, the selection and delection of 10 pence worth of penny sweets after sitting through a Church service was my own kind of sacrament. Now I’m older, it’s dinner, “supper”, or, as my northern-hailing mother has instilled in us: tea.

Sunday night tea is special because it breaks the usual rules of nutrition and balance and order. As children we inherited the notion of “tea tea”, a meal served on a wobbling tea trolley in the lounge (rather than around the dining or kitchen table) in front of Antiques Roadshow, that contained no items of nutritional value. Main course would be crumpets, glistening with butter and a slick of marmite. Pudding would be cake, or flapjack. Depending on the season, toasted teacakes might be involved. Water was replaced with very weak, milky “children’s tea”. We would persist through Songs of Praise to get to the good stuff: watching someone learn the true value of the heirloom they’d let gather dust in the attic for decades.

As an adult, Sunday night tea takes different forms depending on the balance of the weekend. An indulgent one will result in noodles: we drink down the clear, salty broth, dotted with oil, and feel it restoring our hangovers or sleep deprivation, as if we were characters in a video game low on energy. If we’ve had a quiet one, M will roast a chicken and it’ll become an activity in itself: buying the bird, putting the oven on, pausing what we’re doing to baste every 20 minutes or so. Sometimes it is beans on toast. Sometimes it is egg and soldiers. It is always easy, and always looked forward to: this final bite of the weekend, before bath and bed.

These are less raucous nights than the pub, but we are lucky enough that our home is warmer now. Still, though, the need for simplicity and comfort persists. With time I’ve come to realise that Sunday nights are less about endings and more about beginnings: the start of a new week, of a night’s rest before the rush begins again. We bunker down and carb up in preparation of the week ahead, and it is delicious.