My mother’s best advice: the secret to good pastry is cold wrists

When I was growing up, she rarely dispensed advice. Instead, I watched her closely, holding on to her quiet wisdom

I often picture my mother that wild, hot summer we moved to the house of my childhood. She is 5ft 3in in the long grass, wearing a vest and a pair of small cut-off shorts. She is digging borders and battling the sticky bobs. She is telling me about the patch of tiger lilies and the cooking-apple tree; about the light speckling through the unkempt branches. “Glory be to God for dappled things,” she says.

My mother has always been a rare combination of poetry and practicality – I know few others given to quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins while simultaneously hacking down nettles, or tiling walls while listening to John Betjeman records. She has a remarkable gift for transforming the ordinary: a bedroom skirting board would be decorated with a mouse and a mouse hole; a packed lunch’s sandwiches cut at unexpected angles; the most mundane shopping trip often accommodated a detour to the art shop to admire the bottles of Winsor & Newton inks.

The house we moved into that summer was derelict. My brother and I counted ladybirds in the garden while she knocked out ceilings, waxed beams, stripped paint, raised and reconstructed an original tiled floor to meet the stipulations of the local planning officer. One mysterious night, when we were all asleep, she somehow single-handedly transported a large stone lintel several times her own bodyweight from the garden, into the house, and up into position above the fireplace.

When I was growing up, she rarely dispensed advice. Instead, I watched her closely – the things she did, the things she didn’t, the way she moved through the world. And through this I learned that there is joy in capability, language, hardware stores, cryptic crosswords, reverse parking, careful eyeliner and going to the tip. I learned that it is important for people not to feel unnoticed, that it is a pleasure to be able to name the trees, that it is a gift to tell a person how many blackbirds you saw that day.

Sometimes, when I was small, I would hover at her elbow as she cooked; following her carefully as she chopped onions, pressed garlic, sliced and peeled and grated. It was in this way that I received one of the few specific pieces of advice she has ever passed down: “The secret to good pastry is cold wrists.”

It is true, of course. But I have held on to these words ever since, not only as the recommendation of an exceptional cook, but because they seem to carry something of the quiet wisdom particular to my mother: sometimes the answer does not lie in the first place you might look; sometimes the hard thing is easier than you think; sometimes, it really is worth making your own pastry.