I spent Wednesday evening drinking a G&T on a long, wooden table of a working kitchen in a luxury hotel. Service had started and was gently ramping up. I’ve not stepped inside a professional kitchen since I was a teenager unloading the dishwasher in a village pub, and as I sat there all I kept thinking of The Bear, as orders came in and men in white jackets shouted in unison. It was quiet and it was fascinating: this was a kitchen where the staff were valued and well-looked after, where they ate the same seasonal produce that the guests did. I watched one of them pour mugfuls of what looked like herbal squash from a huge glass jar filled with ice, lifting it up like it was a plastic beaker, then return to squeezing lemons and shaking pans and slicing orange peel. All this, for plates of food that will vanish in minutes. A marvel, really.

I was at the kitchen table for the same reasons I was at the hotel: to start hatching plans with them about something that savour members will find out about first. (If you want to upgrade your subscription, by the way, you have five more days to benefit from the 20% discount on annual membership). I’d not had much of a chance to think about the trip beyond making sure there was enough milk pumped for the baby; I’m on a big deadline at the moment, there’s a few other things going on besides. But as I saw the landscape flatten and roughen as the train hit the edges of the New Forest, the rangy fields with shaggy ponies appear on the drive in, I found my body exhaling a little. I’d been put in a room that had a balcony that opened into the woodland and the birdsong was full. I slept with the door open, let all that clear, moonlit January air flood in.

Other good things this week:...