Saturday 22 March

‘I love you more than all the tea in China,’ was how my grandmother expressed her affection for Barton and me from an early age. I can only imagine how our faces must have curled east, west or anywhere away from all that unconditional love - as full-fat creamy, super-nourishing and wrinkly-skinned as her rice pud. For the tiny, beautiful, Chelsea Watts-Amis such adult cooing is a few years from being recognized as embarrassing; a few dozen more may pass before she begins her own regurgitations of affection, yet from our own first gushing an appreciation - too late - of the fact that elderly bloods, along with those in their late youth, assembled in Swarthy Erick’s flat, are just versions of ourselves at different times.