Since I started this journey, bags arrive, unbidden, at the front door. Anonymous donations from someone who has heard of the magical process which happens to old stuff at the kitchen table of each one of us in the Skip Sisters Collective.

If I can’t use the goodies in the bag, I drop it off to the next Skip Sister down the hill. This passing on isn’t new - it’s a wider community tradition.

Over the last 14 years we have passed on toys, books, recipes, furniture, clothes and comfort, and shared everything to do with school, children, health, food, wine, music and song and more.

If I can use the contents of the bag, and mostly I can, then they go into a makeshift filing system, stored about the house from the box room to the basement, and more recently in the small shed at the end of the equally small garden. But first, I spread the treasure on the kitchen table and spend a while in thought.

Sitting with my cup of tea, surrounded by hairpins, broken necklaces, torn lampshades and the like, turning fantasy into fact, I wonder what my late mother, upon whom I heaped so much scorn for her obsessive need to reuse, mend and hoard” useful things”, would think of me now.

I would like to tell her that all those roads I have briefly trodden, then abandoned for lack of purpose, all the apparently senseless u-turns have eventually led me to the kitchen table to make amazing things.

Propelled by children, community and circumstance to reinvent on a daily basis, I have so much I can pull on - everything I have ever learnt, done, seen and heard.

And everyone who passes by the table adds their bit too. Nothing in this house is ever wasted, and something wonderful and unexpected always makes itself known.