The bottom of the bowl

It's half past eight, some months on, and you're on the sofa. You fancy something. You go to the cupboard, and there's a multipack of small bags and a sharing bag with a clip on it from the weekend when your sister came, and you take a small bag, and you pour it into the cereal bowl that lives on the counter now, and you sit down with the screen off.

The first one is exactly what you wanted. Salt and crunch and the taste you'd been thinking of since dinner. You notice it. The fifth is good. Around the tenth the taste has gone flat, the way it does, and you notice that too, and finish the bowl, and it's the right amount, and you don't want another one, though you could have one, and the cupboard's right there. You turn the programme on. Your hand has nothing to do and doesn't mind.

The list is still going, in the notes on your phone, because it's become a small habit of its own. This week it has five bowls on it and no bottoms. Last week there was a bottom, on the Thursday, from a bag your partner had opened and left on the arm of the sofa, and you noticed at the end and wrote it down and put a clip on the next one and didn't make any promises.

Your daughter asked for a bowl last week. She's seven and she'd watched you do it and she wanted a bowl too, and you gave her one, and she ate her crisps looking at them and told you which one was the best one. You hadn't taught her that. She'd watched.

Your partner has started doing it too, without anything being said. There's a second cereal bowl on the counter, and the sharing bags in the cupboard have clips on them that you didn't put there, and the two of you sit with two small bowls and the screen off for two minutes, which is the only two minutes of the evening you talk, and then the programme goes on.

None of this is a transformation. You still fancy something at half past eight most nights and you still have it. You eat crisps as often as you ever did and about a fifth as many, and they taste of crisps, which they hadn't for years, and the bottom of a sharing bag is a thing you remember the way you remember a hangover, as a feeling you used to have and don't now.

If you take one thing from this book, take this. Tonight, when you open the packet, pour what you'd call a few into a cereal bowl, clip the packet, put it in the cupboard, and eat the bowl with the screen off. That's the whole method. Everything else is detail.