Wren

The 4am feeder may be actively causing your 3am problem.

Cats are very good at anticipating a reliable event and they wake up before it, not at it. A feeder that fires at 4am every night teaches her that something happens around then, and the anticipation window creeps earlier over weeks. This is a well-known way to accidentally build an alarm clock.

Two things that work better than a fixed time:

• Randomise it. Some feeders can fire at variable times; if yours cannot, several small portions at unpredictable hours beats one predictable one.
• Move the reward off the clock entirely. A puzzle feeder or food scattered in hiding places before bed gives her something to do at 3am that does not depend on anything happening at a particular moment.

Worth trying the feeder switched off for a fortnight as a test. If 3am becomes 4:30am or moves around, you have your answer.

On question 1 specifically, and this is the part that reassures people: mould spores are everywhere already. They are in the air in your kitchen right now, on the skin of everything you have bought, and always have been.

So the mouldy tomato is not the source that contaminated the others. It is the one that had an opening — a split skin, damage at the stem scar, a bruise — where the spores that were already present found their way in. Intact skin is a genuinely good barrier, which is why one fruit rots while the one touching it does not.

What that means practically: inspect the rest rather than binning them. Check each one for soft spots, splits and anything weeping at the stem. The sound ones with intact skin are in the same condition they were in at the shop. Use them soon rather than in five days, because proximity to a heavy mould source does raise how many spores are sitting on the outside, waiting for the first bruise.

The variable missing from your list is whether you carry it.

A camera in a cupboard produces nothing. If the ageing body has been staying home, replacing it with a newer one will not change that — the reason it stays home is size and friction, and a new body has the same size and friction.

The question I would ask instead: over the last year, which photos do you actually care about, and which device took them? If the answer is overwhelmingly the phone, the camera was already replaced and this is a decision about admitting it. If there is a category the phone kept failing at, buy for that category specifically rather than buying a general upgrade.

Cleaning, since it is the reason most of these end up at the back of a cupboard: the channels are the problem, not the ridges.

A chainmail scrubber is close to useless in there because it cannot reach the bottom of a narrow channel. What works is a stiff-bristled brush with the pan still hot, and hot water, straight after cooking. Once the fat in the channels cools and sets you have a much worse job.

If it has already built up a sticky varnish down there — which it may well have if it was inherited — that is polymerised fat rather than seasoning, and it is worth stripping and reseasoning once so you start from a clean pan.