How to Dig a Wildlife Pond

First, put soil in a pot. Then, put a seed in the soil. After, add water every day. Finally, wait. The plant will grow.

How to make a simple salad. 1) Wash two tomatoes and one cucumber. 2) Cut them into small pieces. 3) Put them in a bowl. 4) Add a little salt and olive oil. 5) Add some cheese if you want. 6) Mix everything with a big spoon. 7) Enjoy your salad!

How to plant a small vegetable garden. 1) Choose a sunny spot with good soil. Vegetables need at least six hours of sun a day. 2) Clear the area of weeds and large stones. 3) Dig the soil so it is soft and not too hard. 4) Make small rows with a stick, about 30cm apart. 5) Plant your seeds at the correct depth — usually two or three times as deep as the seed is wide. 6) Cover the seeds with soil and water gently. Be careful not to wash the seeds away. 7) Water the garden every day, but not too much. 8) Remove weeds as they grow, so that they do not take the water and food. 9) Protect young plants from birds with a light net. 10) Be patient. Most vegetables need weeks or months before you can eat them.

How to make your first loaf of bread. Don't worry — bread is more forgiving than the internet makes it sound. 1) Put 500g of strong flour in a big bowl with 7g of salt and 7g of yeast (keep the salt and yeast on opposite sides, because salt kills yeast if it touches it directly). 2) Add 320ml of warm water and mix with your hand until everything comes together. It will feel a bit sticky — that's normal. 3) Knead the dough for about ten minutes, until it feels stretchy and smooth. Don't panic if it takes a bit longer; every dough is different. 4) Leave it in a bowl, covered, for about an hour. It should double in size. 5) Shape it into a round loaf and let it rest for another thirty minutes. 6) Bake at 220°C for about 25 minutes, until it sounds hollow when you tap the bottom. Your first loaf might not be perfect. It will still taste amazing.

How to make real soup stock, properly, from bones. This takes time, but almost no effort, and the difference between a stock made from bones and anything in a packet is, genuinely, the difference between music and elevator music. 1) Start with roasted bones if possible — leftover from a chicken, a beef joint, or whatever you have. Raw bones work, but roasting them first transforms the flavour. 2) Put the bones in a large, heavy pot and cover them with cold water — at least five centimetres above the bones. Cold water draws out more flavour than hot. This seems counter-intuitive. Trust it. 3) Bring the pot slowly to a gentle simmer. Don't let it boil; rapid boiling breaks down gelatin and produces a cloudy, greasy stock. A lazy, barely-moving surface is exactly what you want. 4) Add aromatics — an onion, a couple of carrots, a stick of celery, a bay leaf, a few peppercorns. Resist the temptation to add salt at this stage; you want the stock to reduce freely without concentrating. 5) Skim the foam off the top as it rises during the first hour. This is the single most important step for a clear, clean stock, and the one most people skip. 6) Simmer for three to four hours for chicken, six to eight for beef. There is no shortcut. Leave it alone. 7) Strain it, cool it, skim the fat when it sets on top, and store it. What you will have, by the end of this, is not really 'stock'. It's a quiet declaration of intent about the kind of food you want to cook. And once you have a jar of it in the fridge, you will find, slightly to your own surprise, that you start cooking differently altogether.

How to write a letter — a real one, on paper, in the post. I accept that this already sounds faintly anachronistic, like learning to dial a rotary phone or fold a fitted sheet, and I accept that I am unlikely to convince anyone who has not, in some quiet corner of themselves, already suspected that something has gone wrong. Still. The instructions are these.

1) Find a pen you do not hate. This turns out to matter more than you think. The hand, given a bad instrument, writes an awkward, self-conscious letter; the same hand, given a good one, writes more or less what it would say out loud, which is, in the end, what you are after. If the pen skips or smudges, find a different pen. The letter will not survive the pen. You have to trust me on this.

2) Buy real paper. Lined if you are honest about your handwriting, plain if you are not. Don't be tempted by the expensive stationery sold to people who clearly do not write letters — the very thick, monogrammed, anxious sort. You want paper that behaves like paper, rather than like an event.

3) Sit down, somewhere you will not be interrupted, and begin. Do not plan the letter. Planning is how letters die. Write to a specific person, whose face you can picture, and let the letter address them directly. If you do not know what to say, describe the room you are sitting in. Describe the weather. The letter, in its own time, will work out where it is going.

4) Make a mistake, and do not rewrite the letter. This is the part modern life will fight you on. An email, a message, a text — all of these are revisable, endlessly, until they have been sanded down into the particular, smooth, characterless prose that modern communication tends to produce. A letter is a record of a mind at a specific moment, crossing-out and all. Leave the crossings-out. They are evidence.

5) Fold it, slot it into an envelope, and post it. Do not photograph it. Do not reread it. Do not, under any circumstances, ask yourself whether it 'works' as a piece of writing. It does not need to. It needs only to have been sent.

What you will discover, if you do this occasionally, is a small and largely forgotten pleasure: the experience of having said something to someone without the intermediation of any optimising machinery. No algorithm saw it. No platform recommended your next action. Someone will open it, in a week, and know that you thought about them for the twenty minutes it took to write. That, for my money, is one of the more subversive things a person can do with an afternoon.