Jars of gold

Just like her mother before her, Sam Woulidge needs to feel prepared. At the start of the lockdown this meant big-batching cooking and turning anchovies, garlic and olive oil into a fridge staple fit for kings

- Sam Woulidge

As I type this I have many silver streaks in my hair. Solid silver streaks. I have gone grey in the same way and pattern that my ma did; temples first and eventually a wide silver halo framing the face. I don’t recognise myself in the mirror. I see my mother. I’m uncomfortable with the way I look but I am also strangely attached to it. Level 5, then level 4, and now level 3 means that I cannot visit my dear friend Ellen, who also happens to be my hair stylist and, yes, confidante, too. I have the required colour potion at home and just need to apply it. But I’m not ready to do that yet. I keep putting it off. Perhaps because when I look in the mirror I see my mother.

During lockdown, on the morning of Seb’s birthday, I received a message on Instagram from Vicki Sleet, the talented journalist who I like enormously but with whom I have only ever really spent time with socially at those lovely warm, bighearted press thingies that used to be so much a part of our pre-COVID world. “Darling,” she wrote, “this is really weird – I had the most bizarre dream. It was Karen Dudley’s birthday but your mom came through on a screen at 12 pm to wish you love and to tell you that she’s with you all the time. Felt like I need to tell you! Lots of love xx.”