A child’s memory of a grandparent may begin with the way a room smelled.

Early memory does not organise itself around events. It keeps texture instead: a smell of soap and cooking, the particular light in a back room, the sound of a chair. A child stores the atmosphere a person made rather than the things that person said, which is why so much of what lasts was never planned as memorable. What you provide simply by being somewhere often outlives what you deliberately offer.

If there are children around you, worry less about arranging occasions. The ordinary rooms you let them into, and the smells and sounds inside them, are already doing most of the keeping.