Before any of this, I was a physicist and an engineer. My days were equations and tolerances and the quiet satisfaction of a problem that finally closes. Then one afternoon at the office, the whole future arrived as a smell. Someone nearby had coffee going and something sweet with it, cinnamon, warm, and it hung in the air long after it should have faded. I sat there and thought, not entirely seriously at first, that a person could build a whole life around that.

An engineer cannot leave an idea alone. You start measuring it. What makes a cinnamon roll actually good, and why do so many of them disappoint. It turns out a roll is a small engineering problem wearing the costume of a treat. Hydration, proving time, heat, the geometry of the swirl. I ran it like an experiment, batch after batch, changing one thing at a time and writing down what happened, until the dough stopped being a guess and became a recipe. The coffee got the same treatment, a machine and a great deal of ruined milk on the way to something worth serving.

At some point a whim becomes a business, and a business needs an address. A new inbox, sinamon@outlook.com, filled up faster than I expected. Suppliers to set up, a roaster to talk to, our first few people to hire. In the same weeks we opened an Instagram account and started posting before there was much to show, only a name, a drawing and the words opening soon. From the first day, whatever happened in the shop happened on the feed as well. It felt right that people could watch the thing being built.

The shop itself was small, a room on Walcott Street in Mount Lawley barely big enough for an oven, a counter and a few people at a time. We fitted it out through October, and then, near the end of the month, we opened the doors.

I did not expect what came next. The first day was overwhelming. People waited far longer than anyone should for a cinnamon roll, out on the footpath, in a line I had not dared to imagine. The next morning I sat down and wrote an apology on Instagram to everyone who had queued, and a promise to be readier. We were open six until ten every day, and every one of those nights felt like a small thing held together with tape and hope.

That is where it begins. A smell in an office, a stack of failed trays, an inbox, a feed, and a little shop that was busier than it had any right to be. Everything Sinamon has become since started in those few weeks of October 2018. This is the first of the stories, and there are a lot of them to tell.