Despite being convinced that parenthood would be a barfy-smelling, cheerio-crunching, sweatpant-wearing purgatory, I had a baby.

January 2005 bewitched us with a wriggling, scruffy, golden retriever of a kid named Evan. Alongside this first pregnancy this space was born. Recently, sweet | salty has prompted me to capture a part of the human experience I would have thought inhospitable to light.

Happily recruited into the baby gulag, we became pregnant with identical twin boys. In May 2007 they were born catastrophically, three months early. One survived and one did not. Liam, who lived for six weeks, is a hole in our hearts, murmuring to us every day. His mirror-brother Ben lives and thrives for two.

We carry on, struck by lightening, simultaneously torn to shreds and inspired to live in technicolour. After Liam died I started a collaborative blog for babylost parents called Glow in the Woods, a retreat and now a warm, embracing and entirely cherub-free community. I spent a lot of time with my camera in-hand, chasing light, and so joined Shutter Sisters as a founding contributor. And I set myself to the task of finishing a silly novel I'd started. It's being published in November 2009.

Why sweetsalty? Because that’s what it is.*

Kate

*SALT makes sugar taste sweeter, say researchers at the Leatherhead Food Research Association in Surrey. The team asked trained tasters to rate the sweetness of samples of sugared water, some of which had been laced with small amounts of sodium chloride. The salt-laced samples tasted up to 40 per cent sweeter than unlaced samples, even though salt has no inherent sweetness ( Food Chemistry, vol 70, p 1). The results support a model which suggests that receptors in the tongue work more efficiently in the presence of sodium ions.   ~ New Scientist magazine 13 May 2000