I overheard the man about halfway through my visit: “Take a seat, make yourself at home.” There weren’t many people booked in for the 2.15pm entry; just me and a serious-faced man, dancing around one another in the small cottage that sits behind the door to Kettle’s Yard. It was only after asking that I realised we’d been waiting for permission to climb the slatted wooden staircase beyond, to enter into the modernist expanse of the rest of the house.

For those first 15 minutes we carried the words of the museum guide self-consciously: we weren’t to touch any of the objects, but encouraged to sit down and look at the paintings that had been hung at ankle-height. This was in the spirit of Kettle’s Yard. Jim and Helen Ede, the people who knocked four cottages together to create a home and filled it with early 20th-century art, would open it from 2pm to 4pm daily for students and strangers to enter in and consider the work.

I was squeezing in my visit. Booked a ticket opportunistically when I knew I would be speaking at Cambridge and there would be time to go before I caught the train back home. I nearly didn’t go; I was tired, I liked the idea of a stretch of time on the sofa without anyone else in the house. But one of the women at the festival was kind and encouraging: “There will be plenty of time to go back to your baby,” she said. “Take the afternoon for yourself.”

Once we went upstairs, the museum guide explained, we could spend as much time as we liked there. We could look at things until closing, if we wanted. There were a lot of chairs to be sat upon.

I’d grossly underestimated the size of the place; assumed the house was little, a few rooms with the oak-leaved geraniums and bookshelves I’d seen on Instagram, not a sprawling feat of architecture. I loved the way the floorboards and the crooked ceilings belied the building’s origins; I grew up in a house that squeaked underfoot and had done for centuries. I enjoyed the flaking spines of Penguin classics slotted neatly into a perfectly sized alcove in the stairwell. I liked how the arched window and large, abstract painting created a sense of a Parisian loft, at a time more glamorous than this blustery Sunday afternoon. I loved the double-height of the extension, of the way it allowed a person to see everything going on from a position of hiding. The Edes didn’t have children, but I wondered if any escaped up here during parties; it would be the perfect look-out.

I took photos; thought about what it is to have a collector’s eye for beauty and a minimalist’s eye for restraint; fell in love with a Ben Nicholson painting of apples and pears in the finest hues of peach and green and pencil-lead; bought a postcard of it in the shop afterwards.

What I didn’t do was linger, although the instruction to do so made me pang. A few months ago I read All The Beauty in the World, a book by Patrick Bringley based on the 10 years he spent as a guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While M raced through several books that week, I read this one alone. It changed how I thought about going to art galleries, how I thought about looking - really looking. How rare and difficult it is to do that; how many of us fail.

It’s funny, being in a museum where you are actively challenged to hole up. I was doubly aware of how I spent my time there, of the looking and the sitting and whether I was doing enough of any of it (I wasn’t, but mostly for me). The instruction - to sit, to engage - came at the end of a week where my life, which has been so portioned up and so accounted for, for so long, had been particularly time-poor. A house of cards with one edge off-kilter. I’d known it wasn’t sustainable, but I’d bargained with myself that it was a temporary blip.

Still, time and sitting is something I’m keenly aware of at the moment. For months, I have been living through the prism of how long the baby can be awake for. That is now embroidered over in baby mealtimes and milk times and bath times and bed. The space in between is ours to fill, sometimes with the necessary (walking to the supermarket, clearing up the kitchen), sometimes with the fun (seeing friends, going somewhere new), sometimes with the extraordinary (rolling around on the bed, giggling). My time - to write, to eat, to rest - happens when he sleeps.

I have spun us a web of support and, it sometimes feels, of constraint. I like knowing what happens when but it takes an unexpected courage to flirt with it. At some point I suppose it became easier to stick to a timetable. I have grown less adventurous as he has grown more so.

We never really did sit. I envisaged hours of watching television and reading books, but the baby is active and feeds in minutes, always has done. He rolls on the floor or plays while I potter around him. Sometimes I remark that he is not a cuddler, not one of those children happy to sit and be stroked. But my mother said we were the same; that we picked it up from her. When we were tiny, she renovated houses.

Sitting will come in time, I’m sure. While I was sitting - on white-covered chairs and wicker ones - and taking in the novelty of this little portion of time I had afforded myself, the baby cut his first tooth. Gleaming, ivory, surprisingly sharp. A strange new object of its own. One day it will fall out and I’ll want to create my own museum for it.