It has taken me somewhat by surprise to notice, just a moment ago, that I have started using my mother’s handcream. That’s an odd statement I know. But after years spent trying different pots, fussily discounting brand after brand, pooh-poohing other people’s recommendations, I had found my Holy Grail of handcreams. Without it I am lost. My hands feel rubbish, and that makes me a bit tetchy.

I consider it such an essential that when my mum was dying my husband bought me a little emergency tube to put in my handbag for days when I needed a pick-me-up as I sat by her bedside.

When I occasionally used Mum’s handcream at her house I always thought it was sticky and a bit cheap, the old-fashioned label had, I don’t think, changed since I was a baby. If you try to rub it in too much it leaves bits on your hands. I have never been someone patient enough to let handcream dry on its own.

At £1.29 a pot it is perfectly good but most definitely not a luxury beauty product.

But Mum never showed any interest in trying other brands. She loved it so much that when she thought it had been discontinued our family started searching for it in every Boots we went near.

Between us we tracked down about six pots, three of which were the last three in stock in some town I was on a day trip to. I was thrilled – though felt a tad guilty that there might be someone else out there who only used Cremolia and didn’t have children looking for it in four different counties. Not guilty enough to leave one on the shelf for them though. Mum’s cupboard was replenished and we all rested easy again.

After some considerable time it came back in to stock, one wonders if it was by public demand, hoardes of rampaging old ladies complaining that the handcream that had been used by generations was no longer deemed worthy in a modern society.

And therein lies the rub – used by generations.

When Mum died and we came to clear out her house we got to the point where we were all tired and emotional.

But with so much to do we needed to press on. After a restorative cuppa, my sister and I chose the bathroom – an ‘easy hit’ we said, nothing sentimental in there, right? My sister started by taking down a laminated Mabel Lucie Attwell poster off the wall, a reprint of a poem Mum had loved when she was little and recited to me when I was a child. From behind it fell a note, handwritten by my Mum on a paper bag, saying the poster was for me because I liked it as much as she did.

An ‘easy hit’ this room was not. I remained relatively composed. Relatively being the key word.

So armed with a bin liner we opened the cupboard ready to scoop up moisturisers and tubes of squeezed-in-the-middle toothpaste. One of the first things my sister pulled out and lobbed in the bag was a jar of Cremolia, one of my mother’s own little secret stockpile should she ever be faced with production stopping again. I lost it. I don’t know why. It was just a jar of handcream. But I reached in the bag, fished it out, and scurried into my room.

That jar of Cremolia made me cry as much as pretty much anything we dealt with save for a few notes and her clothes. I had seen my mother unscrew the golden lid a hundred thousand times over almost 50 years, dabbing just one finger inside as the washing up water glugged down the plughole. It smelled like her hands, the ones that had dressed me when I was little, cuddled me, stroked my hair when I was having the ‘screaming habdabs’.

Now it’s sitting on my desk, with another waiting in the cupboard near the kitchen sink. And several times a day I absent-mindedly unscrew the lid and dab just one finger inside like she did. And I get it. Mum didn’t use that handcream because it was the best on the market. She didn’t use it because it was cheap and she had little money for luxury items. She used it because her mother had used it. And probably her mother’s mother before her.

So now my lovely L’Occitane with shea butter sits in my desk drawer, pulled out from time to time when I feel the need for something more nourishing than the gooey stuff that I can buy 14 pots of for the same price. But I have a feeling that the makers of Smith’s Cremolia didn’t lose one more customer when Mum died, they simply gained a new generation.

“I want you to read this one out,” she said, and I raised my eyes to find her looking straight at me.

The words struck fear in to my heart. My novel writing teacher, a quirkily-brilliant, uber-cool author, wanted me to read the opening chapter of the proffered book out loud in class.

Despite being well into my thirties, I instantly became the little kid who was asked to go outside the classroom and read the big clock on the wall, then tell the teacher what it said. All eyes were on me – and I couldn’t tell the time.

I refused. Didn’t fancy it. Rubbish at reading out loud, yada yada yada. But Daphne insisted.

“I know you will love this book,” she said. “I just know it.”

And so I made a snap decision; which made me look more pathetic, not being confident enough to read out loud, or being a bit crap at it?

So I picked up the book and read.

From line one I was hooked.

‘I’m like, I don’t believe this shit,’ it said.

When I look back at that opening line and the content of the story I have no idea what Daphne thought I would love about it. Although I do cuss and curse, I had never done so in front of her. I have a reasonably pleasant accent that was nothing like the New York street slang in the narrative. And drugs are really not my bag.

But on my way home from the college I went to the bookshop, bought a copy, took it home and read it cover to cover. Daphne was right, I loved it.

It’s not so much that this book was the most incredible thing I have ever read, more that it opened my eyes to what I was missing. It was the book that really properly turned me in to a reader.

From that experience onwards I ditched the pot-boilers and light-hearted holiday reads and started to take recommendations. I read pretty-much every book Daphne mentioned, I sucked up E. Annie Proulx and Anne Tyler who were among her favourite writers (and now mine), and then I started choosing books by authors I had never heard of before. Sometimes I just picked titles I liked, sometimes I judged books by their covers. Some of them I hated, others I loved so much I re-read the last few chapters because I hadn’t wanted them to end.

Story Of My Life proved to be pivotal in my reading history. So although Jay McInerney is not my favourite writer and I was later disappointed by his better-known titles, Story Of My Life is officially my favourite book.

I have, in fact, three copies, none of which I can bear to get rid of.

When I worked in a bar one of the other barmaids, a girl called Karen, was doing a writing course and I couldn’t wait to share this novel with her. Big mistake. Huge.

Sometime later, when I had been feeling twitchy about the fact that she had had it so long, I asked her if she had finished reading it.

She looked at me blankly. I reminded her. Described the cover. Re-capped the story.

“Oh,” she said. And then went on to tell me how when she’d split up with her dunderhead boyfriend she’d left loads of stuff at their flat and she really didn’t want to phone him and ask for it back. He’d probably dumped everything of hers in the bin, anyway, she said.

I politely brushed over it, told her it wasn’t important, it was just a book after all. But secretly I was gutted. So my bezzie and me started the search for another copy. We found plenty. None of them had the right cover with the black and white photo on the front. Others found their way on to my bookshelf along the way. A beautiful little Bloomsbury edition that I felt I could lend out. One that arrived all wrapped up with a postcard from the friend who had scoured second-hand bookshops across the land – right cover, but a hardback.

I read each one to make them mine, and then I became attached. Finally she found one that looked right. It came with the inscription that simply said: “I believe you may have been looking for this.” And I loved it, I loved the quest she’d been on to find me a replacement; it was a special thing. Now all three copies sit in among the thinned-out books that remain on my shelves.

But in the same way that some people think fondly of their first teenage love, sometimes I wonder if that first copy that changed my reading habits forever made someone else happy or is sitting at the bottom of a landfill dump somewhere.

Like a first love it has a special place in my memory and I will sometimes think of it wistfully and sigh.