Bonfire night is coming up, so here is a recipe for all of you

I know most people on this site are over in the States, where I guess you don't have Bonfire Night. Here in England we celebrate the 5th November with a bonfire and fireworks and we burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes, who tried to blow up the Houses of Parliament a long time ago.

We did halloween, too, but we didn't have pumpkins. My Dad used to carve out a swede to make a lantern - so the smell of burnt swede is the smell of halloween for me.

When I was a kid in the north of England it was traditional to eat parkin, a kind of oaty gingerbread, and I just made some parkin cookies. They are so good that I wanted to share them with everybody on this website.

Here goes:

125g butter
2 tablespoons black treacle
100g stem ginger, diced small
125g light soft brown sugar
75 g oats
100g plain flour
25 g cocoa
1 teaspoon bicarb of soda
2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon mixed spice
100g dark chocolate, chopped into tiny bits

Preheat the oven to 160C/325F/gas mark 3.

Melt the butter in a pan, remove from the heat and stir in the treacle, stem ginger, sugar and oats.

Mix the flour, cocoa, ground ginger and mixed spice. Add to the mixture, and stir in the chocolate.

Roll into walnut sized blobs (very messy), plonk onto a baking tray lined with nonstick baking paper.

Bake for about 20 minutes. Take them out, leave for about 5 minutes, then slide the paper onto a rack to cool and firm up.

They are very dark, and grown up. It's the black treacle that gives them character. My childhood in a cookie.

I am coming up to the end of round 2. It has been a very strange time. I feel like I am repaying debts most of the time, rather than giving - so many people are being so kind to me.

Mark drove me to radiotherapy yesterday. It's a tragic story - his wife was unwell for about 6 weeks at the start of the summer, then collapsed, was taken to hospital, they found she had cancer with multiple secondaries and she died 3 weeks later. They have 3 children, 17, 15 and 12. It's been terrible. He has been so good to me over the last few weeks, and the 3 hours we spent in the car gave us a chance to talk about how it's been for him. I hope that was a good thing.