by Joshua Rey with quotes from Michelle Shocked's Strawberry Jam, from the album Arkansas Traveller

A dozen homes in four years, mostly in London or the 3rd World, and then owing to circs too complex to go into here, I landed in rural Cambridgeshire, in an old cottage with half an acre of fruit trees and a prehistoric cast iron range.

Now, you live in a village and you have to go in for the Flower and Produce show. But jam is difficult and strange and your mother has to teach you how to make it, isn't it? No: once you seize the principles, it's a cinch. You do it by doing it.

This is all you need to know:

In fruit there's a chemical called something-or-other. There's more in some fruits and less in others. Damsons and apples have a lot, Strawberries not very much. And if you heat up this chemical and mix it with sugar, you get pectin, and pectin makes things stick together.

This may be a bit of a simplification, but for jam-making purposes it's good enough.

So to make jam you get some fruit and cut out the bits that aren't so nice to eat (with stone fruits you can pick the stones out later if you prefer). Cut it in chunks. Heat it gently in a pan until it goes mushy, which takes a long time but very little supervision. Maybe you put in a dribble of water if it looks apt to burn.

Then get some sugar - a pound or so for every pound of fruit, but a bit more or less doesn't matter - and pour it in the pan. Turn up the heat so it boils.

Now you need to supervise things. You see, the more heat and the more time on the heat, the more pectin you get. And you want enough pectin so it holds together, but not so much that it turns to glue. So once it boils you have to keep sampling it by putting a blob on a plate, waiting until it cools a bit and then trying to scrape it off. If it all runs away, there's not enough pectin, but if it crumples up, you're o.k. Remember, though, that by the time you've finished doing the test, the fruit has cooked a bit more, so you need to stop when it's not quite ready.

Cunning plan: put a few sideplates in the freezer before you start and use them for the tests: then the jam will cool quicker and it won't take so long to test.

Now the jam is done. Wait! Where are you going to put it?

Before you started you had to get some jars and wash them cleaner than clean and put them in the oven on a low heat to keep them sterile. Put the lids in too, but don't seal the jars yet.

Now take the jars out of the oven one by one, and, using a freshly cleaned jug, scoop up the jam from the pan and pour it into the jars. Put the lid and leave it all to cool. The hot air between the jam and the lid contracts as it cools, which seals everything up tight.

That's it! It tastes much nicer than what you buy from the shops because it has no preservatives - the sterilising and sealing keeps it fresh for months or years. But once you open a jar, you may want to keep it in the fridge.

My only other pieces of advice are (a) have a garden with fruit trees in it so you can preserve fruit you picked that very minute and (b) listen to Michelle Shocked, Arkansas Traveller whilst you work.

I made mine with damsons and it won second prize at the Teversham and Fulbourn Flower and Produce Show.