Tears, stains and breakages tended to.

Found some silver thread to darn a skirt that my mother bought me to make me smile when I was very young and tired, and put broken biscuits aside to collect for a cheesecake base.

I don't collect them because I don't want to waste them, but because cheesecake is my favourite cake, and it's most enjoyable with a base of broken biscuits, a variety of crumb, sudden saltiness, a hint of chocolate.

Those stains are all the outskirts of paintings I've done over the years and things I've built. There's a school library somewhere painted with birds and trees that, if I stood next to it in the skirt, I would be part of again, connected by paint.

There's a backroom of a paint shop that I don't have the key to any more, but there may still be a small spillage on the floor that the hem of my skirt would fit just as neatly.

The tear I darned was made by me pushing my thumb right through where some chemical reaction had made the fabric brittle, after inventing a way to fill a dark room in a museum with electric ghosts

To break is to record a change in pressure, to stain is to record a movement made in a world of contrasts. To darn is a slow smile spreading across a loved skirt so that it can hold legs as well as memories

To clean a thing is to read it. A broken biscuit is more smaller biscuits, and sometimes future cake. An unbroken biscuit sometimes is also future cake that does not know it yet.

Cheesecake, in this way, is my favourite cake.

Here's page 99 of "Home Needlecraft", just in case.