Pots of slime, pig heads, sexy dolls… we were only looking for a present for my son’s fourth birthday

This week I found myself in a large toy shop in a retail park off London’s North Circular. We were looking, in a pleasant panic, for a present for my son’s fourth birthday. His birthdays always hit me in an odd way, a bit like those slaps round the face they have in films to stop the woman screaming. Because: he was born at the beginning of the pandemic and, just as his early developmental stages like sitting up or eating solids worked as a marker of time having passed, of us having survived, so do his birthdays. It is four years, this means, since those tight, hot days of the first Covid lockdown, of sanitiser-cracked hands and the brisk hell of home schooling, and every time the anniversary comes round I find myself having to sit down, take a breath.

Anyway, this toy shop, good God. Do you have any ideas what toys are today? I was not prepared. There are the board games, which include your Guess Who’s and so on, but they are overwhelmed by other games called things like, Who Can Poo On Who and Fart School and Diarrhoea of a CEO and I may be misremembering titles slightly yes, but this was very much the gist, boxes with rabid cartoon characters covered in phlegm and instructions that involve, for eg, burping one’s name.

The actor and cookbook author, 58, copes with a looming empty nest by inviting everyone around her table

Sunday worries? My Sundays are changing. My kids are now 17 and 21, and we’re at a crossroads between me being in control and them being old enough to be in control. I’m in an area of grief. The empty nesting has left me quite sad.

Family time? Sundays have such a weight of expectation of being together as a family. Food is at the centre of my life – we would all break bread together. Now the kids say, ‘I think you’ll find I’m going to be asleep until 4pm.’ This generation isn’t as scared of their parents as we were.

Sundays growing up? My parents were divorced, so it was a game of two halves, travelling between them. Everyone would be drinking. My dad always had a big cigar in his mouth, there was a lot of arguing, a lot of jokes, and there were dogs barking. Everyone seemed to be having an affair in the 70s. In my memory, all the adults were having sex with each other. I was brought up in Surrey. There was nothing else to do other than shag your neighbour.

Sunday grub? I’ve written three cookbooks: I’m a feeder. There’s breakfast, brunch, homemade snacks. Then we have a big roast with homemade pudding. As a child, the house would be full and I liked the chaos. Now, I’ll invite any old strangers just to hear that clink of cutlery.

Sunday me-time? Don’t knock on the door at 7.30am, because Mum’s in the bath. My husband endlessly books massages. I’m like: ‘You all right mate? You could just run a bath.’

How to get a full-brow look, plus Beyoncé’s new hair range and luxe evening scents

Recently, to celebrate what would have been Maria Callas’s 100th birthday , the Merchant of Venice launched a fragrance paying homage to the opera singer – and it smells gorgeous. But let’s talk about the soprano’s brows. Full, healthy, glossy and highly desirable, they were extraordinary. Olaplex’s new Browbond Serum will give you denser brows in four weeks. In the meantime, we can fake it with these products, which will give the wispiest of brows Callas magic in seconds.

1. Charlotte Tilbury Brow Fix £25, charlottetilbury.com
2. BBB London Eyebrow Pen £23, bbb-london.com
3. Morphe Supreme Brow Sculpting Wax £9, selfridges.com
4. Rare Beauty Brow Harmony Flexible Lifting Ge l £17, spacenk.com
5. Anastasia Beverly Hills Brow Freeze Gel £24, sephora.co.uk

The broad beans are in, our giant sunflowers sown. The growing year starts here

Mid-April Sunday morning, 8.30am, before breakfast. Howard and his terrier, Otto, are outside, waiting in the car. They have been away and we are meeting to sow flowers. The plot is tidy, pretty pristine, near ready now for spring.

I have cleared most of the overwintered greens. Faded chards and beets, home to colonies of ravaging snails, are pulled and carted away to the compost. The ragged Red Frills mustard is thriving, tall and beautiful so we will leave it alone. I’ll pick a few spiky, spicy leaves to take home.

We can get into the habit of thinking about our sibling with judgment and criticism

The question Since our mother’s death, my brother and I have had no contact . He lives more than 100 miles away. Our relationship has been very difficult for over 40 years. When we both had young children, things were better for a time. When our dad died, Mum’s health deteriorated and she moved in with me and died 12 years later. During this time, my relationship with my brother was at its worst. Before retirement, we both worked in mental health, but neither of us understand why our family relationship has been so fractured.

There is a family history: our grandfather did not get on with his sister, he and his wife kept secrets, and our dad fell out with his twin! Our childhood was difficult as our father had mental health issues.

Manzanilla and fino sherry are testament to the wonders of yeast. Here are a selection of sturdy favourites and a few quality options, too

Morrisons Fino Sherry, Jerez, Spain NV (£8.50, Morrisons ) Yeast. That’s the secret to the intensely savoury appeal of dry fino and manzanilla sherry. If that sounds like a boneheadedly simplistic statement of the bleeding obvious given that of course, yeast – specifically the strain Saccharomyces cerevisiae – plays an essential role in all wine as the agent of fermentation turning sugar into alcohol, please bear with me. With fino and manzanilla, a specially adapted form of the strain has an extra part to play, with winemakers in and around Jerez in Andalucía, encouraging a thick, almost crusty layer known as flor to form on top of the wines in the barrel as they age. The flor, which acts as barrier between sherry and the air at the top of the barrel, helps create a much lighter (in colour and feel) style than other, darker forms of sherry such as oloroso. It also creates flavours that range from fresh apple to grilled almond, sourdough bread and Marmite, all adding up to such compulsively drinkable bottlings as Morrisons’ bargain own-label bottling.

Hidalgo La Gitana Manzanilla En Rama Spring 2024, Jerez, Spain NV (£19.95, Tanners ) If you find that yeasty tang as compelling as I do, you might want to look for the term ‘en rama’, which translates, literally, as ‘from the branch’, but is best understood as ‘in the raw’. These are fino and manzanilla sherries that are much less heavily filtered than others, bottled straight from the barrel, often in the spring, when the flor layer in the butts is at its most active. The idea is that you get a more intensely lively and savoury-flavoury style. But the annual release of new bottlings also gives sherry producers (the vast majority of whose bottlings rely on blending several years in a consistent house style) the chance to make a wine that is different each year. Among my spring-bottled favourites this year is one from the Hidalgo bodega, which is based in Sanlúcar de Barrameda, home of manzanilla. It’s a vivacious dry sherry with a pronounced, mouthwatering sea-salty seasoning that is particularly good with miso ramen noodles.

Preppy or plain, stripy or simple... The tank top is early summer’s understated hero. Here’s how the sleeveless classic gives every outfit a shot in the arm

Audrey Hepburn in Paris, tennis-themed stationery and a pop-up shop celebrating summer