Farida

Question 2 is where it gets counterintuitive, and it is worth its own explanation because it feels like a contradiction.

Going down is less metabolically costly: you burn fewer calories per minute than going up, and if you measured oxygen consumption it would be clearly lower. So in the energy-budget sense it is easier, and that matches the intuition that you are releasing energy rather than spending it.

But eccentric contractions are unusually damaging to muscle fibres. Holding a load while lengthening produces more microscopic damage than shortening under the same load. That is why walking downhill for an hour leaves you with sore thighs two days later while walking uphill for an hour leaves you tired the same evening and fine afterwards.

So "tiring" is doing two jobs in your question. Downhill is cheaper in fuel and harder on the tissue. Both are true and they are different currencies.

Question 2 has a neat answer: the kitchen is where the food is, and that is precisely why it is less special.

You go to the kitchen many times a day, at unpredictable moments, and she can get your attention there any time she likes. There is no scarcity. The bathroom is a limited-availability, high-attention window with a known start and end.

There is also a plainer version: in the kitchen you are usually doing something with your hands and moving about. In the bathroom you are as close to a stationary lap as you ever get outside the sofa.

Cats optimise for access to their person, not for proximity to food, once food is reliably available. This is the same reason a cat will ignore a full bowl to sit on the newspaper you are reading.

"The point where everything else suddenly gets louder" is a much better instruction than an amount. Tried half a lime in tonight's and it is a different dish.

For a British dish to point at, the closest in role rather than in ingredients is probably a scone with something savoury on it, or: stretching it: the texture and purpose of a good dumpling in a stew: soft, plain, starchy, there to carry a rich sauce.

But the honest answer is that there is no British equivalent, and that is worth saying rather than forcing one. The dish exists in a category Britain does not really have: a savoury breakfast built on a soft quick bread. The British savoury breakfast is fried things next to toast, which is a different structure entirely.

When I explain it now I lead with what it is for, it is a hearty, plain, cheap, filling breakfast, the way a full breakfast is - before describing what is in it. That gets people much closer than any ingredient list, because they stop trying to place it against pudding.

One thing worth knowing for the disposal half: diseased fruit is generally not something to put on a home compost heap.

Home heaps rarely get hot enough for long enough to kill the pathogens reliably, so you risk spreading it back onto the garden with the finished compost. Council green waste is composted at industrial temperatures and does deal with it.

Also relevant if you keep chickens, which many people with an orchard do: they will happily eat windfalls, and that solves both problems at once: though not the mummified ones, which should still just go.