My mother was forever reminding me of things I had not forgotten. ‘You’ll need a knife to open that,’ she said when I reached for a vacuum-pack of coffee in the kitchen cupboard. ‘You’ll need to empty the strainer,’ she said when she found me standing over a sink full of smoggy water doing nothing in particular, just waiting. It was as if I hadn’t learned a single thing in the seven years I’d lived independently, as if my mother refused to acknowledge knowledge attained from any source which wasn’t her.
