for the last week or so, i’ve had three bananas going soft and ripe on the kitchen counter. not just leopard-spotted ripe, but dark, slug-like ripe. and really, i guess i started out with three, but the boy kept cutting them up for baby snacks. at one point i was sitting downstairs at the computer and heard him in the kitchen making knife-extracting, snacktime noises, and had to yell upstairs most unbecomingly, “i’m saving those bananas to cook with!”

for the last week or so, blueberries have been plentiful and cheap… well, affordable at least. remember that time we went to fratelli fresh and reached our hand out for a punnet of blueberries, and then recoiled and fell over frothing when we saw the pricetag? it has not been like that this time. at the supermarket, blueberries were going for a song (.94 a punnet, which, ok, is just over twice the price of an song at the iTunes store. a song and dance then).

for the last week or so, my father was in town. while my mother was here we discussed her dumpling skins, her kenwood chef, and what her old mixer was doing these days, now that she had mr kenwood. it turned out that old mr philips was languishing in a plastic bag in the back of a kitchen cupboard. “aiyah,” she said, “i should have brought it for you.” aiyah, i could only agree. and so a txt was sent and a box was packed, and when my father got off the plane a couple weeks later, he came bearing an electric mixer.

there is a point to all these little stories, and that point is everything came together sweetly — even with just one and a half black bananas — in a loaf tin in a 175° oven. yes, when i tipped it out, it were the most perfect banana-blueberry loaf ever. i didn’t even take a picture of it, because all you have to do is imagine the most perfect banana-blueberry loaf ever, and it was that. i had some fresh hot out of the oven yesterday afternoon, and some more toasted with butter this morning, and i will have more again tomorrow breakfastime, and it will be crunchy on the outside, light and moist on the inside, fat blueberries running deep blue stains over everything.