Every day I ensure that I expand and improve.

A sourdough starter needs feeding every day, and nothing visible happens on any single one of them. Skip a fortnight and you find out it was happening.

Expansion isn't always upward. Sometimes it's sideways: one more person's name, one more way a thing can go wrong, one more route across the city.

Ensuring it daily doesn't mean forcing it daily. It means keeping the conditions right and turning up for the small maintenance nobody applauds, on the days that produce nothing you could point to at dinner.