My mother’s mother was the most centred, practical, measured woman I’ve ever known.

She was a midwife and when she was district, she’d go around on her bicycle. I can recall a bike lock chain with a blue plastic coating – probably the same bike, years later.

I dream of her house. I still have lots of her things and they conjure up sense memories. The roaring sound of the hot air in the heating vents, the feeling of sliding on parquet, the particular smell of the ‘small hall’, which was a peculiar non-room where a china pig moneybox lived.

She had lots of treasures, mostly from travelling with my grandad and alone, but also seemed to be a person for whom possessions meant little. Frugal beyond belief: an empty yoghurt pot would be cleaned and reused. Every time I put some monkey nuts in a glass Gu ramekin, I think of her.

As an adult, I’ve often wished I was more like her. Settled, peaceful. Capable. Maybe I am crafting a life more like hers. Honestly: the good life. All I want is my home and my hobbies.

Hobbies, Lord! She knitted, she embroidered, she gardened, she loved listening to the radio. She played us Gilbert and Sullivan on the record player. She was an avid reader and I read the books in her house over and over. Everything seemed to be from an age apart. My mum’s 60s and 70s toys, books from the 80s. I was obsessed with a book called ‘How it works’ and I now realise the science could easily have been decades out of date. But I know how Velcro works, and how Houdini did his tricks.

Grandma, I think, was the one to crack counting with me. She used chocolate coins and I was as food-motivated as a spaniel. She was, too. There are things I’ve never managed to replace, like her blackcurrant crumble made with her own blackcurrants. The particular way she made porridge so the golden syrup sat on its smooth top and seeped down the sides. We’d sometimes eat it sat at the pull-down ‘breakfast bar’ cabinet in the hall and I’d look at the strange souvenir olive forks and tiny patterned glasses – things from a cocktail age, very unlike my grandma.

Lots of the unlike-Grandma things were relics of my grandad, who died before I was born. I was fascinated by the very technical-looking old radio that my grandma never used. Strange lenses for magnifying text, a jeweller’s loupe. He was a hobbies man, too. There were boxes of slides and suspiciously composed family photos. Everything looked after, sheltered with homemade dust covers.

There was also a bottle of Chanel No. 5, untouched. A snow leopard faux fur, unworn. Probably presents that were ‘too good’ or just totally unfitted to her life. I have both.

What I don’t have is the shoebox of costume jewellery that had mostly belonged to my great aunts. I loved these jewels. There was a huge green paste stone on three strands of fake pearls. Things that would probably be worth money these days mixed in with plastic popper beads from my mum’s childhood.

Ah – but I have the sewing box. The button tin. Things I touch all the time, rifling through like I did when I was little. Inside there are shiny silver nursing buttons, 70s plastic belt buckles, old coins and a thousand other treasures that are often the very thing I need. These are jewel boxes as well, possibly even more precious.

My mind seems to have built its own jewel box of just these memories. I struggle with memory; it’s hard for me to replay things or pinpoint chronology. Sense memories are far clearer, or snapshots of emotions.

But my grandma’s house is clear. A 60s bungalow in a quiet estate was a place of magic for me, and she was magic, too.