Surviving the End of Year Sale Rip Off

Like hundreds of thousands of other Brits, I am Not Well right now. Thank goodness not with the norovirus, but with a cold that has turned itself into one of the most severe I can remember coming down with in quite a while. Throat like razor blades, constant painful coughing, choking and spluttering mid sneeze, hot and cold, exhausted, and pretty miserable with it. I only push stoicism that far. I may be British but even Brits have their limits and these days I do a perfect line in feeling sorry for myself. Actually, even without a cold I am pretty good at feeling sorry for myself. A tragic loss in the family has resulted, among other things, in a new propensity of mine to weep whenever anyone on TV weeps, no matter how stupid. I wept watching Look Who's Talking. I wept watching the Strictly Come Dancing Final. I am an unstoppable faucet. Only time will slow the flow. Bang a cold on top of that and I am headed straight for Fetid Duvet Land, surrounded by endless dirty teacups and soup mugs.  OK, enough of that. So, I'm not well. And now is a really bad time not to be well, because now is Sale Time. Shops everywhere started their sales on or around Christmas Day and all retail hell has broken loose. This year like every year I have pursued a really successful approach to Sales shopping. I don't. That's it. I buy an item in a Sale only if it fulfils these criteria: a) I saw it earlier in the year, b) I fell totally and hopelessly in love with it, c) I saw a need for it in my life, d) my eyes popped when I saw the price tag. That's it. Any item that does not fulfil all of the above criteria, does not get bought. So, when the Toast catalogue declared its sale I hopped right in, searched out the sweater they were asking ridiculous money for that I really really wanted for my birthday (handily located in January) but was not going to ask anyone to mortgage their house  to buy, not even in the name of love, found it at 50% off, bought it. End of. Except of course, that being ill changes your perspective on sale shopping and therein lies the ultimate sales psychology. Sales are for people who buy stuff as a reward for themselves, for whatever reason, but in my case it would be because I feel awful, and I imagine quite a few shoppers out there have reasons not a million miles away from mine. In my snotty state, hot water bottle on lap, Paracetamol within reach, dirty tissues scattered across the carpet, I Go Online and suddenly items I do not need, would not normally give a second's glance to in fact, suddenly possess an allure. They look shiny and new and massively reachable with their knocked down price tag. I on the other hand am not shiny and new. I am dirty and sick and feel and look disgusting. But if I buy that dress/sweater/bag/sofa etc etc, I will cease to feel that way. I will feel as shiny and new as the item I have just bought.  The temptation is extraordinary, and it takes superhuman strength, something I do not possess in abundance right now, to spot it for what it is. It is not me talking. It is my Sorry For Itself alter ego. It's the same damn voice that reaches for milk chocolate digestives, actually. I know this voice really, really well. So, I'm willing to bet, do you. And so do all those sales marketeers, guys. That's the voice they are appealing to. So. I put that FABULOUS red shift dress with the leopard print collar that I don't need and probably does not fit, into the online basket, and then I left it there. A bit like a really, really rude email that you compose and then save but don't send. I went away and refilled my hot water bottle, made myself another cup of soup (ah, sachets...even foodies like me have a use for soup sachets when just heaving yourself off the sofa feels like a climb to the Summit of Mount Everest), go back to my trusty IPad, look again at it. The scales fall from my eyes and I am back to normal. This is an Impulse Buy, it is emotionally motivated, and I know if I buy it I will not only regret it but will feel ashamed of myself for buying it. I close down the website, and await the knock of the door that will herald the delivery of the Toast sweater that I really, really wanted.

How to survive the Christmas break after the death of someone you really, really love

We don't do Christmas. We are Jewish. It's all about Chanukah for us, candles and doughnuts and potato pancakes and dreidls, chocolate coins, naff singing about miracles and oil and the like, exchange of presents and hilarious Chanukah decorations featuring menorahs and dreidls hanging lopsidedly from our kitchen ceiling. Generally Chanukah comes a few weeks before Christmas so it's usually a time when I feel at my most smug. I get to snuggle up on the sofa with my hot chocolate, feet on the pouffe, reading whatever spurious chick mag I have decided to indulge in, while my non Jewish mates huff and puff their way round Oxford Street on a manic round of last minute frenzied Christmas shopping, all the stress of Christmas cooking and Christmas family get togethers ahead of them. Not me. I spend the Christmas period sleeping late, cycling on the canal way with my kids, luxuriating in the joy of doing nothing, or frequenting the Jewish or Muslim owned shops in the area that remain obdurately open for business. But this year is different. This year is different because I have lost my elder sister, who died of cancer in October. And with the approach of Christmas it has become horribly clear that the impression I have been under for pretty much all of my life that my religious heritage gave me an automatic opt-out, has been misguided. You cannot help but be sucked in to the preparations around you but even if you shut your eyes to the Christmas trees and the pervading smell of cinnamon wafting through the entrance of your local Tesco, you contend with the realities that school is out, and for two weeks it is all about Family Time. I have been approaching the month of December with minor dread, as have the rest of my bereaved family. Most of us have taken the practical decision to simply decamp and get the hell away from it all. Those of us who either can't afford that option, or couldn't get it together to organise a getaway, or need to keep working through this time, have done some serious thinking about how you do this family thing when, every time you come together as a family, it reinforces the massive, crater sized gap that the departure of someone you love so much has left, particularly the untimeliness of that person's death. We have come together as a family a few times since my sister died and I will tell you this. It's bloody hard. Even coming together for a joyous occasion is, in these early days, almost impossible to do without being overwhelmed by the sense of loss, the sense of incompleteness, the feeling of being cheated, robbed of a key person in the family circle. So. This Christmas period, though we don't do the tree or the gifts or the turkey, we are experimenting with coming together in bits of family. We are all acutely aware of the importance, and the desire, to stick together. But in these early days, rebuilding the family as a whole, feels too hard. So we convene in little groups, where the gap feels a bit less obvious. And we do things slightly differently, so as not to be reminded by our usual family rituals of what we have lost. No playing the usual family games, a concerted effort to reorganise our food, convening at other family homes, as a way of rebuilding family in a different context. You'll have to confront it sometime, says a mate of mine.Well, yes. It is still very early days after all. But I would argue that we are confronting it. Families have different responses to a bereavement, but I would have thought that however you rebuild, you would have to rebuild differently. That is what we have started doing this December. So. Christmas Day will find me helping out at a homeless shelter in North London, cycling across the heath with the kids, if I can force them out of bed early enough, in the afternoon, and indulging in some pasta and pulses based arts and crafts in the evening with my niece and nephews.  If I don't end up getting capitulating and getting pissed on advocaat, which would be a first in itself as I LOATHE the stuff.

Tights were made for wardrobe malfunction

Seriously, right. The person who invented tights was undoubtedly someone who did not expect to be the one wearing them. Tights are one of those things civil servants dream up. An idea that looks fantastic on paper and then when you actually try it out on real people it is so full of holes you spend the next twenty years kicking yourself for not running a focus group to check out whether it would be workable but by then it's too late so you just let it run and run. Tights. Such a great concept. You put them on, they might make your legs look sexy, kooky, funky, trendy, or just warm. They turn your legs into a fashion accessory. They stop you getting blisters in your shoes. (In theory). You can get them in every conceivable colour - indeed, I type this clad in bright yellow tights that I am clashing merrily with a turquoise sweater dress - and you can get them gossamer thin or lumberjack thick, in wool or silk, with stretch or with tummy-holder-inner, especially if you buy them in Marks & Spencer. Indeed, M&S bosses have clearly decided all their customers are post partum. Nothing else can explain the impossibility of finding a simple pair of tights that does not have the word "slimming" somewhere on the label. As far as I can remember, every wardrobe malfunction I have ever had, has involved tights. It's either about coming out of the loo and realising far too late that your skirt is tucked into then at the back. Or, much more frequently, it's about wearing tights that have insufficient stretch to accommodate a generous lunch and start rolling down to your thighs in the most inexorable and unpleasant fashion. And let's be clear about this. Once your tights have decided to part company with your torso, there is nothing you can do about it. No amount of dashing into public loos to hoist them back up will stop them once they have made their minds up. Not even tucking them into your knickers, tying a knot in the waistband, or even stapling them to your skirt (yes I have tried this in desperation, and of course, Mr Bean like, the staringly obvious consequence was that the nylon tore at the staple leaving me with a waistband around my middle and the rest of the tight around my ankles. Niiice.  A few days back I was wearing a pair of  80 denir (what the hell is a denier, anyway) tights in a fabulous shade of deep bottle green, bought can I just tell you, from Harvey Nichols, and therefore came with an implicit guarantee that since they had cost me an arm and at least one of the legs they were designed to cover, the last thing they were going to do was let you down. But this is what they proceeded to do. Nothing to do with not fitting properly in the first place, or with lunchtime gluttony that they could not accommodate. Oh no. This was about incompatible material. What does this mean? Well, it was freezing bloody cold so along with the tights I wore a wool dress and a fleecy coat, and the material of the tights rubbed against the wool which caused them to, well,  have an encounter with gravity which gravity won, hands down.  This happened, thank goodness, at the end of the working day. Important, that, since the end of the working day is the point when I stop caring what I look like. Up to about 3pm you will find me touching up my make up courtesy of Bobbi Brown before an important meeting, or making sure my hair is appropriately "lifted" just before I have my staff meeting. But come 4pm I give up and tell myself that millions of women who have worked their butts off since 7am that day have mascara down to their knees so why should I look any different. Of course, the mascara is one thing. Tights that are down at your knees is really something quite different. It was an amusing sideshow for commuters stuck in a queue to join the North Circular Road from my area to see me hobbling down the main road, my hands seemingly clutched at my sides, waddling deliberately to prevent further slippage. So what's the answer? Only one really. Wear trousers. Or get used to frostbitten knees.

Chocolate and speculoos at the Gare du Midi

I made an astonishing Nutella and hazelnut cheesecake at the weekend. Just astonishing. A Nigella recipe, I think from her most recent Italian cookery book? One of those cheesecakes you wonder whether it is a cheating recipe because it just seems too simple to taste authentic. But it tastes quite fantastic. Cream cheese, Nutella and vanilla filling; digestive biscuit, Nutella and butter base. Yum, yum. These days my weekend baking tends to result in one cake, and a batch of something that can be divided into around 24 portions. This time it's chocolate and speculoos squares. These things are made with ingredients sourced entirely from the Gare du Midi in Brussels, en route to the Eurostar departures lounge. Seems like a weird place to go foodie, really. But if you are a baker, particularly a chocolate baker, anywhere in Brussels is sheer heaven. Gare du Midi does a fab job of titillating your chocolate tastebuds into chocolate overdrive even as you fish for your passport in your overloaded bag. Just out of the Metro station there is a chocolate shop selling high end pralines. Godiva, Neuhaus...they have "curated" (I cannot believe I am even using this word to describe a range of chocolates - this tells you more than almost anything else could about my obsession with the stuff) a range of pralines that would make you weep. I travel to Brussels a lot these days and on this particular trip my eye is caught by a tub of Speculoos paste. What is it? You mean you haven't tried this stuff? Speculoos is a kind of spiced shortbread. In Belgium, they make practically everything from the stuff. Speculoos biscuits, yogurt, ice cream, cakes and chocolate. I buy the paste, bring it home, put it on the table, look at it, think to myself, if it were a jar of peanut butter, what would I do with it? I get out a square tray, scrape out the Speculoos paste, add butter and soft brown sugar to it, and press it into my tin. Then I take the other bag out of my wheelie suitcase, empty out a box of pralines, take several deep breaths, and put them in a bowl over a saucepan of boiling water so that they melt into a maddeningly fragrant, marbled pool of chocolate. I pour this carefully over my speculoos crumbs so that it covers them completely. Put the tin in the fridge. Take it out an hour later, cut up the block into squares, et voila. Gare du Midi on a plate.

Party clothes are nostalgic

I have a generally emotion-free approach to my wardrobe. Every year, when December comes around, I take a good look at my clothes, piece by piece, and anything that didn't see the light of day at least once in the previous year, finds its way into a binliner which then finds its way to my local Oxfam. I have an ulterior motive for this - my birthday is in January, and my Mother generally celebrates my birthday by taking me clothes shopping. Got to have space for all those new clothes! - so this is not a space saving process, it is more of what civil servants would call a Policy Refresh. Clear out your outdated, ill fitting numbers for your swishy look that is infinitely more suited to the more Mature You. I go through jackets, dresses, skirts and trousers, shoes and coats and assemble a pile and when rejected items leave the house the sight of the bag raises not so much of a sigh. But this year, beginning my usual clearout process, my hand falls on a hanger on which sits a beautiful black, long, fishtail party dress with diamante decoration around the heart shaped neck and the straps. I take it out. I wore this two years ago at a very special party. Why did it survive last year's clearout if I haven't worn it since then? Although a Frank Usher dress, it actually cost me 15 quid in a designer label warehouse sale so it's not the price of the thing that is making me hold on to it. A thought occurs to me and I pull back my range of dresses, not unlike the key scene in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Lo and behold I see 6 or 7 hangers of clothes that I have passed over almost instinctively in my otherwise rigorous, emotionless decluttering exercise. Party clothes. There are clothes in this section that I first wore in my late teens and haven't put on since. One of them is a truly evil garment - a onesie with knickerbocker legs, in electric blue with checks. OMG. What was I thinking. On the other hand, I remember that I wore this thing to a New Year Party at which I met some bloke...I put it back again. Next to it is a blue (blue is a uniting theme of my earlier years - I loved the colour, principally because I grew up a tomboy, so it was a symbol of rebellion to counterbalance my sisters' preferred signature colours of pink and lilac) ra ra skirt, which I remember wearing with cowboy boots to a Christmas disco in the mid eighties, where I met this guy...I put it back again. I sit on my bed and contemplate this awful range of clothes. I am not a fan of vintage. In my opinion, fashion evolves for a very good reason - we should be able to look back on the eighties with satisfying shudder, not spend the 21st century resurrecting it. Nostalgia is a retroactive emotion, that is why it is nostalgia. Resurrecting these clothes is backward facing, and I am a relentlessly forward facing kinda gal. So why can't I throw these clothes out? I think about it. Parties. There is something so very momentous about choosing a special outfit for a special occasion. Thinking about it beforehand, planning it carefully, dreaming about its accessories, getting hair and make up just right, anticipating the fun that will be had, feeling the surge of confidence that comes with putting on something spangly, swanky, clingy, loud, clashy - something that makes you feel like you stand out. Not, stand  out of the crowd, but stand out of your normal everyday self. You think I give work clothes anything like this attention? My work dress regime goes like this. I have a staple set of items, one of which I pick at 6am when the whole world is so dark I have to concentrate really hard to ensure I don't grab the wrong coloured tights, I slap my basic blusher/eyeshadow/mascara and I run, without a backward look in the mirror. Any major wardrobe malfunctions get fixed in the office loo on the 7th floor after I've bolted my porridge. Party dressing? I start my party dressing hours, sometimes days before I actually put the clothes on. And that means that the experience of those occasions gets stamped on to the outfit I wore for them. Hmm. I go to the wardrobe. Take them all out, even the fishtail dress. Put them in their own binliner. Label it "Party memories". And put the binliner back on the floor of the  wardrobe. There. More space for my next round of birthday fashion spree, without compromising on my own party heritage. Win win.

Colours, colours, colours

I'm going through a strange and fabulous phase of contradictions. Emotionally, things remain messy with a distinct dark side. And so it is for anyone who is only a month on from the loss of a loved one. Lately this has leaked out through anger. I have to think very carefully on the tube, at work, in the street, at the supermarket check out, to make sure I don't lose my rag over something any level headed and balanced person would take in their stride. That need to control my rage so I don't get landed with an ASBO leaks out in other ways, all loosely under the heading of REBELLION. And this is coming out in colour, big time. Last week I read a fashion article in a Sunday supplement that advised women over 40 not to wear coloured tights. Not a good look for the age, apparently. Women over 40 who want to do colour, need to do it with a small "pop", like wearing a bright pair of earrings with their grey or taupe twinsets. I read this article very carefully. Then went straight out and bought 6 pairs of tights. One deep blood red. One burgundy. One forest green. One teal. One bright acid turquoise. One deep yellow. And have worn them every day since. And, frankly, not with taupe twinsets either. This morning saw me laying out a local community tea wearing a bright yellow Top Shop sweater, denim skirt and acid turquoise tights. Yesterday I pranced up the high street in a purple corduroy mini skirt with yellow tights and brown Fly knee high boots. I am having a ball with this. If I keep going I am probably going to end up looking like a walking Lego box. In fact, if I add my green Gap snood (I love that word by the way. Who invented it?It sounds like an allergic sneeze), I probably already do resemble Lego Duplo.  It should feel counterintuitive, to be processing such extreme sadness with such an outward show of upbeat optimism, which is what bright colours always seem to me to project. But perhaps it isn't so odd. You can shout with colour as effectively as you can shout as a customer service manager, except wearing loud colours means nobody gets hurt (unless they don't have their sunglasses with them, in which case there is that risk of retinal damage).  Do I in reality look like a clown, and will I some day soon wake up to it and go back to Zara to invest in some ubiquitous black or khaki? In answer to the first, well that's a relative question isn't it. As John Malkovich said so brilliantly in Burn After Reading in response to his colleague who accured him of having a drinking problem "You're a Mormon. Next to you we ALL have a drinking problem". And so it is on the streets of London. It is Autumn, and commuters are wearing Sludge. Next to Sludge, any pop of colour is going to come across a bit like Mr Zippo's Flying Circus. Doesn't make it a crime to sport it. And in answer to the second?  No. Never have, certainly not going to start now. Yellow tights. Feels good to know I still have that rebellious streak. Feels even better to be liberated by grief to indulge it.

A walk in the park

I run through the park. Every day. Not in my exercise gear, IPod surgically attached to my arm. No. I run through the park from the station to the office, bags flying. I run through the park from the office to meetings. At the end of the day, I run through the park from my office back to the station. It isn't a sprint or a jog. It's more like something between a trot and a gallop, fuelled entirely by stress. And I do it pretty much without thinking about it. Stepping into the park I am immediately reminded by an automatic guilt switch in my brain that I am not there to enjoy the foliage, I am in the park with a destination in mind and I sure as hell had better get there as quickly as possible, so that...the world will not end? So that my colleagues will not miss a second longer of my awesome brain power than they absolutely have to? So that I will not miss the last ever Northern line train before the world comes to an end? Stupid, isn't it. But it took me quite a long time to work out how contradictory this was. I love telling people that my morning commute takes in a beautiful park, but frankly if you're running so fast you don't notice the trees what is the point. You might as well hit the apocalypse of Victoria station and be done with it. So, after a therapeutic coffee with a mate at work I decided to do something I had not done in 15 years of galloping through this park. I would go out at lunchtime and walk around it, without any bags or phones on me, taking in every sight as I walked. I would go slowly, and tune out any inner thoughts so I could hear the noises around me properly. So off I went. As I stepped into the park, my brain message began to beat the familiar drum. Hurry up! Get those tourists out of your way, they are stopping your ascent up the career ladder! I ignored them resolutely, and to throw my ant march like routine entirely, I picked a different route. I walked slowly by the quite beautiful flowers that the park gardeners had obviously been at some pains to plan out. I stopped and sniffed the lake, and watched moorhens fight swans. Brave lot, those moorhens. Swans, it turns out, take no prisoners. I passed two people snogging passionately among the hydrangeas, and a group of exhausted teenagers moaning about how early they came into London on the Eurostar. And more tourists, Japanese this lot, all with their up to the minute technological gadgets, taking millions and millions of pictures. Including of me. I passed civil servants taking covert sips of tea out of flasks. A couple having a furious row in low undertones so as not to draw attention to their appalling relationship break out, playing itself out among the ferns. I passed Beefeaters walking back from their duty stint at Buckingham Palace. Gardeners digging up summer debris and whingeing about the mess the Olympics infrastructure had left behind. Ducks begging cravenly of ignorant humans hell bent on messing up their digestive systems with stale bread. Squirrels chasing each other from tree to tree, stopping only to snatch bread before the ducks could get to it. Dogs, chasing the squirrels. By the time I got back to my office, I was totally humbled. How was it possible to zone out of all of this world watching? I had walked through the complete panoply of human behaviour and quite a bit of animal experience in the space of 45 minutes. It was a great lesson. A daily park walk is now part of my life. And will no doubt furnish me with endless blogging material as yet more quirks of human interaction unfold in the shadow of the London Eye.

Montezuma chocolate

I have been a bit quiet on the blog recently. Well, not wholly surprising that in the aftermath of my sister's untimely death, I would find myself randomly unable to complete tasks, or in fact start some of them. So the blog has seemed a bit overwhelming. But you find your way back to most things one step at a time, and my way back to my blog is of course via baking. I started this blog thinking about baking through the lens of adversity - a huge piece of surgery to rebuild one of my feet which made me immobile for months. I had no idea at the time that worse adversity was in store for me, but thank goodness I discovered then the rehabilitative power of baking. It was a skill I drew on, numbly at first in the last month, but increasingly thankfully as day by painful day has passed. When I was kneeling on a chair, my plaster encased foot sticking out awkwardly as I kneaded dough or operated my Kitchen Aid (and yes I did have one of these well before The Great British Bake Off), combining flour, eggs and sugar took my mind away from the daily frustration of crutches. Now, the combining of the same ingredients gives me parameters to which my bewildered mind clings. Every baker has favourite tasks, and mine is the chopping of highest quality chocolate. I was making double chocolate brownies at the weekend - easy enough to chuck Dr Oetker chocolate chips into the mix and be done with it, and up to about a year or so ago I would have been happy to do that. But really, where's the joy in it? Satisfying baking processes involve personal commitment. And my expression of personal commitment, is unwrapping a lump of Montezuma couverture chocolate, sharpening my knife, and cutting carefully so that I get knobbly shards. Anyone will tell you the difference between evenly shaped chocolate chips, and knobbly shards in your double chocolate brownies, is absolutely crucial. The odd huge lump of chocolate in a bite of brownie is pure dark chocolate heaven. A bite of chocolate chip is barely savoured. But this time, I chopped, and chopped, and chopped, and chopped. Carefully, mesmerisingly, almost as if my brain were reminding my hands of the long practised task, helping to re-establish predictability, satisfaction in conducting a task, stability and control into a world that had been rocked by grief. I must have chopped for at least an hour. My recipe gleefully proclaimed that the length of the entire brownie making process would not be more than 25 minutes. I was sorely tempted to add, or 2 hours if using this task as therapy.

Mid life allure

I am struck each week by the number of magazine supplements falling over themselves in their efforts to advise me on how to retain my inner sexiness now that I am offically Past My Best. Chances are you will find at least one feature in every freebie magazine. Of course all these articles have a marketing objective so it is usually linked to clothes you need to buy or skincare to invest in or exercises to buy on DVD. I tend to read these articles with rapt attention, only to experience terminal disappointment. After all, the advice is quite depressingly unoriginal by and large - wear your skirt a bit longer, no more sleeveless tops, go for elegance rather than fashion, start spending hundreds on bags and jewellery because apparently you can afford it in your forties, avoid bright colours as they make you stand out for the wrong reason, if you must wear a bright colour make it just a splash of one in a scarf, and finally, leopardprint shoes are in for any woman over the age of fifty thanks to Theresa May. It takes a great deal of self esteem to look beyond this largely pointless advice, and none of us possesses enough confidence all of the time.  This is presumably why quite a lot of taupe turtlenecks feature in the morning commute among Women Of A Certain Age. Me, I like to stay true to my instincts, which broadly go like this: black is not a colour, and I Do Colour. I stay with colours that flatter my skin tone but I am still capable of going completely oer the top with them - indeed, I often make it my business to do so. Do not wear coloured tights, say the articles. Oh dear, I think with irony, then I had better wear my bright red tights as frequently as possible before I get any older. Invest in a timeless classic, like a really expensive ring, exhorts the fashion advisor. I ponder over that one and wonder who, with kids in middle school, has money to blow on overpriced trinkets when school uniform, school trips, house maintenance, family food, and massive university tuition fees, need to take priority. On top of which, with the amount of dough kneading I do, the chances  of a ring losing itself in batter and turning up on someone's plate, or in their jaws, is frankly too high to risk paying for. Spend a hundred quid on Creme de La Mer anti ageing algae cream. I worked in a pharmacy every Summer for about 10 years and concluded from that experience that a tub of E45 at £2.50 would more than do the trick.If there is one thing to remember when reading this stuff it is that I have spent my entire adolescence wondering what other people think about how I look. The most liberating quality I have acquired with years of life experience, is the ability not to give a toss what other people think about how I dress, speak or move and I'll be damned if that gets taken away from me. So here's the thing. Ongoing recovery of my reconstructed foot, which I have worked like a trooper to restore mobility to, prohibits the purchase of any shoe with a heel, no matter how kitten heel.  So I will commute in trainers and spend my working day in stylish, flat boots packed out with surgical orthotics that nobody can see. Living in a grey climate means I have a daily urge to counteract the weather with colour. Green and yellow are my current favourites. Early morning sport means I need to change fast from sporty to office elegance so jersey dresses and easy, comfortable jackets are massive winners in my wardrobe, added to which they pack up perfectly for short overseas visits. Does any of this chime with advice from the experts? None of it.  Which means that, chances are it's spot on.

Fashion 101 for commuters

Taking the tube in the evening can be a fetid business. Trains rumbling through Leicester Square, around the West End, or up to Camden, are a heaving mass of ill-clad limbs, frippery lacy tops, jeans halfway down the bum, tattoos everywhere, loud chatter frequently punctuated by obscenities and barely comprehensible acronyms. That's SICK! yells one teenager, apparently voicing her approval and admiration, not her disgust. You might find a smattering of deeply intimidated theatregoers at this time, who take refuge behind their outsized and overpriced brochures of Les Miserables, but otherwise, unless you're out on the piss, night time tube is a no no. Working hours commuting, by contrast, is a sober affair. The key here is to wear one of two colours, either black, or sludge. If you are not wearing black or sludge, you need to spare people's hungover heads by covering your attire up with something black or sludge coloured. Until recently the required reading material was a Metro, but now 9 in 10 of my neighbours (people squashed up against my coccyx) play games, listen to music, or read on their IPods. Even with my IPad I'm beginning to feel a bit out there and dinosaurish. Acceptable accessories? None at all if you can help it. Commuting men use gym backpacks, if they haven't crammed the contents of their flat into their capacious duffel coat pockets. Dark glasses help you to avoid embarrassing eye contact, and Starbucks mini thermoses remain the coffee ingesting mode du jour. The objective here is to accomplish one's commute as quickly, painlessly (numbly, if possible) and vacantly as possible. If there were prizes for the least social contact, two million British commuters would make it to the final round in a heartbeat. So, anything that contravenes this is only one notch below a war crime. A woman steps on to the train at Euston sporting bronze sequinned Ugg boots. Spare us the glint and glitz!! Don't you know this is the carriage for worker ants?? Or did you miss the last train back at 3am after your marathon clubbing night out? A Chinese woman fishes out a huge beef baguette and begins to chew at it meditatively, generously sharing the aroma with a carriagefull of people who are biologically still asleep. Urgh!  Being assailed with Bad Food Smells at 6:30 in the morning is right down there with being trapped opposite two besotted people who don't stop snogging for seven tube stops. Parents taking kids to school in buggies is not OK, people with large suitcases not OK, anyone wearing stilettoes is a health and safety nightmare if the train lurches. The rush hour is strictly Dog Eat Dog. Frankly, the best way to dress for it, is in jackboots and a flak jacket.

Vanilla is the ultimate comfort

I came across a Nigel Slater recipe for vanilla cream buns a few days back. The buns were vanilla flavoured, the cream was a whipped vanilla and butter concoction. It sounded fabulous, so I made it immediately, and it was fabulous. As a thing to eat, frankly, it wasn't a showstopper. But that's the thing about vanilla, isn't it. It's not meant to thrill. Vanilla is an essence that takes you back to childhood, duvets and plump pillows, frothy baths, fluffy socks, your first teddy bear, flowers in full bloom, and black and white movies on a Saturday afternoon. Vanilla is the ultimate expression of comfort. And I note that, among the array of cakes, cookies, puddings and tarts that I roll out at home, the vanilla based ones are always the ones that move the fastest. Vanilla cheesecake. Vanilla breakfast buns. Vanilla custard creams. All of them conjure unctuousness. Brilliant with a cup of tea, that makes you linger over it. So it's no coincidence that vanilla is prevalent in my baking right now. I am after anything that induces comfort in what feels like a very comfortless world right now. Unremitting grief is a nasty train ride through the darkest scenes, that I did not pay to take a ride on, and have no idea when I'll be getting off, or when the scenery on the ride will begin to change. I wake up with it hovering over me, I go through my day bowed by it, I go to bed, my shoulders sagging with it. Baking a batch of vanilla cream buns does not just provide me with a ten minute break, a pause to reward myself with something that brings back memories of better times. It fills the house with an aroma of warmth and positivity in a way that nothing else quite captures. It's like a Harry Potter inspired Patronus, chasing away the Dementors. So. I'm in the market for any great recipes involving vanilla. Any that I haven't already tried, that is, and given my baking productivity recently there cannot be many more out there.

Seasonal coat buying trauma

Why is it so difficult to buy a coat? No other item of clothing causes me this much prevarication and trauma. It can take me between 6 months and 2 years to find the perfect coat, whereas I can scoop up a sweater or a dress without a second's thought, without even trying them on, and shoes are a mechanical, perfunctory, joyless purchase that I make so that I can hit the ground running - literally - usually on the tube. I am in fact schizophrenic about fashion generally. I want to exude elegance, classicism and contemporary style. At the same time, I want to hold in my muffin top, hide my bingo wings, cater to my obstinately flat feet, and ensure I am able at any moment to a) flee from terrorist attacks, b) jog if necessary to my kids' school, c) carry bags of food shopping from the office to the house without getting a shoe heel stuck in the pavement, and c) cause permanent toe or back damage from ill fitting footwear. Fashion and practicality simply do not meet, but nowhere do they cause a more perfect storm than in the coat purchase. Here is what I think I need from a coat. I need effortless style, a coat that I can add a contrast colour belt to, one that goes as well with an evening sequin studded clutch as it does my all purpose classic Kate Spade leather tote. And here is what I need from a coat. I need one that does not look too tight by the end of the day due to the huge comfort lunch I had after a particularly long and boring morning of meetings. I need one I can fold up and chuck with total impunity into the locker in the gym changing room. I need one I can wear a backpack with that contains my workgear, without causing button strain or bunching inelegantly at the shoulders. I want a bright coat, but one that I can wear with anything. I want a smart coat, but I need it to be waterproof and since I have a lifelong aversion to umbrellas, it has to have a hood without looking geeky. I want it short so it can show off my legs to advantage, and I want it long so my legs are warm in the winter. I want pockets so I can put my Oyster card, housekeys, staff pass and loose cash somewhere reliable, but I want a clean line in the cut so no pockets. Consequently I run hither and thither, caught between fashion influence ( I need a military coat! I need a khaki parka!), and practical realities of my work and domestic requirements. The sad truth is that in the end, if you are going to purchase a coat that really does all that a working Mum needs, all roads lead to Boden. And this is really depressing, because Boden coats are a fixture on North London buses and I refuse to add to the daily contingent of waterproof Autumn florals. Yuk. I think I would rather drown. So there is only one other way. And that is, to buy loads of coats. A long one. A short one. A hoodie. A classic. A trench for when it drizzles but doesn't actually rain properly. A fleece jacket for walks in the woods. An all purpose shapeless nasty black thing for Economy class all nighters. A smart red long coat made of posh wool for business travel that can be bundled into an overhead locker and still come out looking good the other side. A cape, because there is a fashion for capes, though of course I can only wear this on the days I don't go to the gym (ever tried wearing a backpack and a cape? Makes you look like Batman caught in a winch. Don't go there.) And since I go to the gym every day, the cape gets worn for 5 minutes on a non rainy Saturday eve between car and pub.  A gilet, because that is as useless as a cape with the one difference that it can accommodate a backpack. A silver frippery coat to throw over party dresses, strictly non wet Summer evenings only. A parka with pockets big enough to accommodate tupperware tubs full of school fete food offerings. Honestly. It's a nightmare. There really is only one other way to do this. Pack up and move to a warm climate.

Grief, and food

If you are reading this blog regularly then you'll have noticed a new theme developing which looks to be neither about baking, nor about injured lower legs. Well, it would hardly surprise anyone that the death of someone I loved as much as my sister, would not influence my thinking, and hence my writing, heavily. Or at least, it would not surprise anyone who had experienced real grief before in their lives. I was recounting to a friend of mine recently a memory I had of my last year at secondary school. I had the misfortune to lose two grandparents in the course of the same year, which was also the year of my A levels. I was very upset by their deaths, and I responded by retreating into my studies. My so called friends responded by bullying me, increasingly mercilessly. When I finally screwed up the courage to call one of them one evening and ask what she thought she was doing making my life even more of a misery than it had already become, she more or less said, and I am paraphrasing here, that I was overdoing the grief thing. Now there, people, is a person who has no idea what it is like to lose someone you love.  Also someone who had no business being a friend of mine, and I made the sensible decision to cut all ties both with her and with her accomplices. I have not spoken to them since and the quality of my life has not suffered for their absence. My point is, I am not sure anyone understands just how painful grief is, and how little power you have to repress it. Indeed, I do not think I would want to try. Grief is a sickening, raw, pain that comes over you in waves, that fills your stomach and your head. Grief intrudes on random unconnected actions. In the last week, grief has caused me to weep in the middle of swimming fast and furious lengths, steaming up my goggles, unprompted by any relevant thought. It has  prompted me to buy at least 20 unneeded items from a supermarket. It has robbed me of energy mid-activity. Halfway through my walk up the road I would have to stop suddenly and lean on a neighbour's wall. Grief blurs my eyesight even without tears, dulls my hearing, unbalances me. I think this stage after a huge loss is what follows denial. It can't be true, she can't have gone, everything will be all right, someone will have found a cure, surely there is something more we can do, is the first wave. And now this. The horrible reaction the body has, to an implicit instinct from the brain, to come to terms with what has happened. Perhaps soon I will be blogging about adjusting to life without the presence, thoughts, warmth, affection, loyalty and confidence of my sister. For now, and for some indefinable period , this is about letting myself go through the awful  upon awful realisation. There is not much comfort during this time. Everybody has their own response. I have two main ways of keeping myself together at this time. One is, a craving for the outdoors. Since completing the official seven days of mourning I have spent the bulk of my days wandering through forests or cycling along river trails. My craving for the outdoors stems mostly from the claustrophobia, not just of seven days in the house, but also of being a fixture on a low chair during that time, surrounded by what feels like hundreds of people I know either slightly, or not at all. But drinking in the colours of Autumn is also strangely comforting. The other response I have, and this will come as no surprise at all, is through baking. I don't claim any Eureka patisserie moments, and in fact I have not created anything at all edible. In the middle of the night I have come downstairs, unable to sleep, and randomly melted chocolate, just for the hypnosis of trickling molten dark chocolate from a spoon. Then I have thrown it away (though yesterday I finally did summon myself to turn it into chocolate truffles). Or, I whisked six egg whites to perfect peaks, and then walked away and left them there for someone else to dispose of. There is truly a therapeutic factor to the alchemy needed to create comforting food. I have always used baking as a way of reducing stress. Now I use it as an outlet for grief, a channel for the pain. Something about engaging the brain away from obsessive memory overload, for all good baking requires your concentration as well as your imagination, brings a temporary relief, and hey. If I weren't baking at this point I would probably be smashing windows and screaming. Nothing wrong with that either, except that putting chocolate truffles on the table is both more productive, and a lot more pleasant for those with whom I live.

Mourning language

In Judaism, when you visit the house of people mourning a loved one the accepted language is to wish them a long life. I have visited a fair few of these, and it has always felt like a weird and unnatural thing to say. Wishing someone a long life? Seems kind of like an obvious aspiration for anyone - why say it? But when you find yourself tongue tied with compassion and awkwardness before grieving relatives, you get that having an agreed sentence to deliver that enables you to behave with dignity and make your exit speedily (a win win for you as well as the mourners). But, there are rebels among us all, especially among the socially challenged, and some people just cannot help themselves. It's amazing how you have managed to keep your looks under the circumstances, says one visitor to me. Shouldn't you make sure you don't have what your sister had, says another.  So sorry you will never see your sister ever again, says a total stranger (could be that someone else in the mourner line up knows who this person is, but I don't, and that makes us strangers, which means he should know to exercise a little less encroaching familiarith with my raw emotions).  I don't like the phrase, I wish you a long life, says one visitor, hanging over me. Back where I come from, we say, I wish you a GOOD life. I look at him, and think to myself, I don't give a monkey's what you prefer to say as long as you get it out and move along.   One person chooses to say absolutely nothing. She paces slowly and solemnly along the line up, and there are a fair few of us so it takes her a while, plus she is leaning on a stick. As she moves with tortuous slowness past us she treats each of us to a lingering, mournful stare.  We look at each other, nonplussed and trying very hard not to giggle. What, we wonder, was that about? Was she bereft of speech? I would not have been surprised if she had burst into a Shakespearean soliloquy, so intent was her gaze. Perhaps she was hiding a camera under the voluminous cloak she was sporting. Perhaps she had made a bet with someone on whether she could get us to cry. She would have lost it hands down. Mourning chat is a buffer, a kind of artificial no cry zone, and the triter it gets, the more surreal and consequently, I am afraid to say, hilarious. Of course, these days hilarity is at a premium so I guess if you can get a few giggles, even in unexpected environments, well then our visitors have done us an unsuspecting good.

Food for mourners

My sister passed away this week. The family is devastated. I won't dwell on the details - the purpose of this post on my blog is to give me a break from the relentlessness of mourning and from the explosions of overwhelming grief in my head, heart and stomach. And being a mourner, for the first time in my life, has opened my eyes to some revelations of human behaviour.  This set of observations is about the food that visitors bring to a house of mourning. I was raised with the instructions that if you visited a house of mourning, you brought with you maxipacks of Tetleys Tea bags. This was because hordes of visitors would come by, expecting sustenance while they sat with the mourners. If not teabags then a pack of sugar, or economy size digestives, or nasty prepacked kosher cakes. And for years I have, without much thought, carried out these instructions, pleased that I was doing my bit to save the mourning family from bankruptcy caused by endless provision of tea to their visitors. Being a mourner myself for the first time has put a different complexion on the affair. I have discovered for instance, that far from being so upset that I cannot eat, I find I crave comfort food, pretty much all the time. And prepacked kosher cakes are a stomach churning put off. What I find I need, is hearty soups, generous casseroles, large succulent chunks of chicken, and loads of carbs. And I have been touched and deeply gratified by those of our visitors who have understood this. As mourners we are not permitted to prepare our own food, which is just as well as these days it is all I can do to get myself out of bed and dressed, something it would appear our sages understood thoroughly, hence the rules - frankly, if you left it to me, right now I could not trust myself to set the kitchen on fire inadvertently in an attempt to make a bowl of pasta. I can't make it to the end of my street without tripping over the kerb because I forgot to do my laces up, I am a menace in my car because I have forgotten to do basic things like check my mirror or signal before making a turn, and I have attempted to visit a bank past closing hours and sit out in the freezing cold with only a t shirt on. See what I mean? The sages had it right. Do not make your food while mourning. So this leaves you at the mercy of people like me who used to pitch up with a vat of teabags. This makes our family dinners an unpredictable experience and gives huge insights into the catering skills and personal culinary foibles of our friends and relatives. Fabulous chicken and spicy rice with olives and peppers from a family friend with a catering business. I really hope she comes back one more time before mourning is over. Thick, protein rich soups from my working Mum friends who understand only too well the value of comfort food. Salmon baked in coconut milk made by a friend so sensitive to the need for tastebud variety, that eating it makes me weep with gratitude (most things make me weep at the moment of course - the postman delivering letters, a dog chasing a ball, even the arrival of the school bus). Breads of all varieties - homemade, posh shop bought, bakery ritual rolls. These are brought by people who have either had the misfortune to go through the same process I am now experiencing for the first time, or they are possessed with an innate understanding of basic human need in time of extreme distress and sorrow. An instinct I have quite clearly grown up without, but which has been a fundamental part of my education, and which I aim to remedy starting right now. Food for the grief stricken. It is about keeping your strength up; nurturing your wounded souls; eating  something enjoyable as a family that restores, for a few precious seconds, the balance that was whipped out from beneath your feet the minute your loved one slipped out of your life. That's it. No. More. Teabags.

The Great British Bake Off

So. The Great British Bake Off is pulling in viewers in the millions. Cue multiple newspaper think pieces wondering why this is - what is it about the nation's obsession with cake and biscuits (hello? How have newspapers only just woken up to our prediliction for sweet and fattening comfort food??), and b), golly gosh how is it that so many men, even unreconstructed football fans, are into the programme? Well, I have no insights to offer into other peoples' motivations, however neanderthal the bulk of their daily existence. But I confess to being a Bake Off fan, and I am not a massive one for foodie programmes. I dip in and out of the Hairy Biker escapades, usually on the days when they encounter cheesecake. I can become a bit avid about Masterchef, though all the spin offs - Junior Masterchef, Celebrity Masterchef, and Masterchef Australia, leave me irretrievably cold. I don't watch any others, though there was a time a few years back when the kids and I would watch Nigella Bites amid howls of laughter as we sent up her come-hither look and her tits to the wind. But TGBBO has me hooked and here is what it is about. It is categorically not about the presenters, who consistently annoy me. As a keen, verging on obsessive baker, I know exactly how irritating it can be to have someone wittering over your shoulder, distracting you from the exacting and alchemic task at hand, while shoving their fists into your batter and making unfunny suggestive comments based on cheap double entendre oooh, what a lovely pair of buns...). I am wildly unimpressed by the setting - marquee somewhere in Somerset shouts unbelievable tweeness, which goes right over the cliff edge whenever the camera does a close up of a Cath Kidston inspired KitchenAid mixer. Yurch. Nope. Here is what it is. When I watch Masterchef I am awed by the skill - it is a show put on for me to admire, because I cannot hope to emulate it. It is therefore like Mastermind, or the Olympics, or Jane Austen novels. But Bake Off? Yup, I can do those things. I can  make spicy crackers, herby breads, party cakes and occasion cakes, and I bet if I were asked to create an inspiration out of gingerbread I could , given time, come up with something that would knock the Colesseum or the derelict barn complete with caramel cobwebs, into a cocked gingerbread hat. It's the world of possibility that has me hooked. I note from the programme that Mary Berry has never baked with potato flour, for example, and my eyebrows shoot past my bangs because I do, every year at Passover, and I know how to turn out perfect almond cakes with the stuff. Shock horror, I know something the judges do not know! I find myself disagreeing with Nick Hollywood or whatever his name is when he contests that you cannot make a decent cheesecake with half fat cheese. I immediately run off to make it so I can disprove him, and I do. I watch each contestant's technique, looking for tips. It is not their celebrity status I am interested in. This is not vicarious stuff. I am learning here, it is a non stop GCSE in Domestic Science, cake baking option. It is a remarkable programme for depicting the doable. Thus it is that after every programme I can guarantee my family will find themselves sitting down to the week's technical challenge, an eclectic range, from croquembouche to doughnuts. It is the ultimate achievable dream, it is the London Fashion week of baking - weird, wacky and wonderful recipes to add annually to my repertoire. Roll on next week - I still have three pages of my recipe book to fill...

Centreparcs and your inner child

I haven't blogged for a while. Work and general awfulness have taken over, and as a result I reached for the Centerparcs website and decided to hit one of their villages for a long weekend of manufactured decompression.  Over the years we have experimented with different Centerparcs venues and have settled on Elveden Forest, because it fulfils two basic criteria: it's the closest. And it's the flattest. Flat is important when fulfilling the Centerparcs rule of no cars on The Land. That means bikes and I am a total fair weather cyclist. If there are hills, I'm not doing it. So a huge flat space that extends into forest that you can cycle in for hours is perfect. But Centerparcs also means making a total prat of yourself on water slides and fake rapids along with other parents and their kids, and unruly teenagers, and young couples, and, well, basically most combinations of human groups. The rapids in particular are a dignity-free venue. I must have ended up half on top of some total stranger at least ten times, spewed out at the end into a deep pool with a group of people I never met before, and frankly after the second or third time you give up adjusting your swimsuit and apologising. Nobody gives a damn. They're all too busy having fun. And after a while, so do you. Here are my top faves at Centerparcs: going on a Segway for the first time ever. Going down The White Slide so often I got a hole in the seat of my swimsuit and carpet burns on my derriere. Cycling along the lake early in the morning to buy a paper. Fast and furious badminton matches with my kids. And here are the things that routinely drive me nuts at Centerparcs: it must have the worst mattresses ever in the history of overnight accommodation. What were they thinking? That Brits prefer to sleep on lumpy and bumpy? Then there are the ducks. Thousands of them, attuned to the sound of any rustling of bags which they take to mean, duck feed time. At which point they gather round your French window  and stage an invasion. No duck feed? Attack. Centerparcs is the first place I ever got a duck bite. Who even knew ducks bit?? And bitten when I was reading a paper in the open lounge, minding my own business. What else? Smoke alarms that go off if you switch the toaster on. Talk about being risk averse.  Smoke alarms that go off if the kettle steams too much (smoke alarm does not differentiate between smoke and steam - anything resembling a plume triggers the panic button).  But hey. I am someone who has a pathological aversion to anything resembling camping, and Centerparcs teeters on the edge. However, for another go on the White Slide or an off road trip on a Segway, I am prepared to put up with quite a lot. Even a manic smoke alarm. And the mattress? I brought a sleeping bag and put the sofa cushions on the floor. Result.

Invasion of The Skincare Samples

I am decluttering my skincare. I think of myself as someone who is pretty parlous on the skincare regime. I pass scarey women with faux alabaster skin in John Lewis who ask me if I use a primer and I genuinely pride myself on the knowledge that I have no knowledge. I have not a clue what they are talking about and I try very hard to make it my business not to know. Not because they are not talking sense - after all, look at their faux alabaster skin! I could have alabaster skin like theirs if only I used a primer, whatever that is, or BB cream, whatever the hell that is, instead of my ageing, increasingly knackered looking sunken under eye shadows. No, it isn't that I don't need the stuff. It is that I don't  NEED the stuff. I might need it on my face, but I don't need it on my shelves. Skincare has a creepy way of building up on you. One minute BB cream is this week's must have. The next, someone somewhere has stumbled on a product made of sheep's urine that can take years off your double chin and the next, all the Sunday supplements are screaming about it, and you rush out and buy it because you don't want to miss out, and it gets put next to the BB cream, and you use it slavishly for a week, and then you read an article about an amazing new thing made out of hairs from a bee's bottom, and, well, it's Groundhog Day. Well I won't go there. No siree. I am happy with my cleanser, my sometimes toner for when I use particularly manky mascara that won't come off in one swipe, and my moisturiser, and frankly I don't hear any complaints. Nobody leans over in the tube and says to me, lady, you REALLY need to go home and finish your skincare regime, you look like one of the Three Witches. Nobody flinches when they get on the train and catch my eye, do they? Or if they do, they have sufficient social grace to hide it. So when I go to do my semi annual clearout of my skincare shelves I tell myself with much self congratulation that this is going to be a quick and easy chore. But  as I clean surplus talc off the bathroom cupboard shelf and remove accumulated toothpaste and spittle gunge from the cup, something catches my eye. I bend down and find a cardboard box. It is full, literally brimming, with skincare samples. I realise that I never ever say no when offered a sample skincare sachet or bottle in a store. I bring them home, put them in the cardboard box, and do not look at them ever again. I decide to do an audit. After all, I travel a lot for work, and samples are perfect for one or two night stopovers. Let's see. I need mini cleanser, toner and moisturiser. Anything else is useless.  Except maybe if there's shampoo. Or deodorant. But there will be loads of those, right? After  2 hours or so, I have two piles. One is tiny. That is the pile of samples  I might have a use for. There are maybe three sachets and two bottles in this pile. The second resembles Ben Nevis. This is the pile of samples whose function I simply do not understand. It is not that I do not have a use for them. It is that I have not a clue what they do, or where they go, or why I would want to add precious time to my daily skincare regime applying them. I pick one up. Age defying eye serum. Age defying. That has kind of a Star Wars theme to it. I can imagine opening the tube, applying the cream to my crowsfeet, and as I do, the cream screams, I DEFY you, signs of ageing on my faux alabaster skin! I pick up another. Pomegranate pore scrub. Or there is rosepetal serum. Why is it called a serum, anyway? Aren't serums things they give you in action movies to make you bionic, or get you to tell the baddie things you don't want him to know? Another one: UV protection nasal enhancer. Is that just a posh term for brownnosing?  I contemplate the mountain of sachets. I suppose I could donate them to a really posh old peoples' home. All this anti-ageing stuff should go down well. I can't see Oxfam taking the pore scrubs. Is there a charity that distributes complex skincare for the underprivileged? I make a decision. I take the cardboard box full of alien freebies minus the small pile, I take it to my bin, and upend it. The cardboard box goes into the recycling. It is probably more valuable than all of its former contents. I return to the bathroom. I find a small cardboard box. I put the remaining three sachets and two bottles in it. There. Plenty of space for the next assault of twenty first century skincare that I don't understand and which will transform me into a Stepford Wife if only I would open them up and use the damn things.

Rocky Road

I was in the middle of preparing a good old fashioned Jewish Friday night dinner - chicken soup with noodles, roast chicken, potato wedges -when I suddenly abandoned the lot and began making Rocky Road. I fished out a bag of mini marshmallows and chopped them up. I found small bags of almonds and macadamia nuts, roasted them and chopped them up. I melted dark and milk chocolate in separate bowls over gently simmering hot water. I stirred the marshmallow into the dark chocolate, and nuts into the milk. Spooned three lines of the milk chocolate mixture into a brownie tin. Filled the two lines in between with the dark. Swirled it a bit to create a marbled effect. Put in the fridge. And went back to my Friday night cooking. Not that the chicken was exactly functional cooking - husband away, one child on a sleepover, leaving just two of us in the house, the food was major overkill, but I baked for the textures and smells that are redolent of the weekend - but still, the compulsion to break off and create something as spurious as Rocky Road was a need to rebel, depart from the plan, do something mischievous. Rocky Road. It is pregnant with endless metaphor. It sums up perfectly what it is like to cycle in London. As a phrase it pretty much encapsulates my entire daily experience -navigating between commute, work, parent/teacher conferences, homework, domestic chores and family health issues, on good days with focus and well organised ease born of years of practice, on bad days a collision course of bumps and obstacles. Hm. Maybe not such a spurious choice after all. Baking that represents your daily experience. Makes perfect sense. To an obsessive foodie addicted to eclectic baking.

Queen of Puddings

Queen of Puddings. What an amazing, hyperbolically beautiful description for a bowl of custard, jam and meringue. Seriously, you could knock it up in 5 minutes with shop bought meringue shells, a jar of Tesco Value Raspberry jam and a can of Birds Eye custard powder and most people probably wouldn't know any differently. But if that were the right way to do it, it would have a different name, wouldn't it. It'd be called something like an Eton Mess, only it can't be called that because that name's already been taken for a similar melange involving strawberries, cream and meringue, although basically the same concept. No, the Queen of Puddings has to have its custard, jam and meringue homemade in three separate components entirely from scratch, because the Queen of Puddings is about beautifully showy, colourful layers, which are carefully ordered and which bake in a disciplined shape. The wonder is that it isn't called the Queen Elizabeth of Puddings. I plan to attempt this pudding this evening, and already the possible variations are doing my head in. White breadcrumbs. What middle class family has white breadcrumbs readily available? Wholemeal is the pain du jour in our family, and it's been several decades since anyone with half a brain kept their stale white bread to feed to the ducks, as we all now know it gives the poor things the runs. Being Jewish has a certain advantage, particularly being Jewish and baking this creation so soon after Jewish New Year, as we have a surfeit of half eaten challah - eggy, chewy white bread used every festival and Sabbath as part of the ritual of welcoming the festival, and possessing a joy of its own to plait and bake - so these, more usually used to make a snobby version of chocolate bread and butter pudding, can be temporarily redeployed. And the jam? Easily procured from your local corner shop, but Mary Berry is uncompromising in her view that you should make her own. I am one of the world's multitasking professionals, but even I would struggle to stir raspberries and sugar without letting it burn, while making dinner for four and checking homework with the other. But then of course baking is never about the food. It is about the slow, mesmerising alchemic process, the hypnotic stirring, folding, whisking and processing, it is about the unmatchable satisfaction of creating combinations that smell, feel, look irresistable...ok, homemade jam it is, and the kids will just have to have fishfingers. A fabulous pudding will more than atone for a main course procured from the depths of the family freezer.

Priority seats

I walked on to my local tube station platform this morning, went to sit down on a bench, and saw that the first of the four seats on the bench had been newly designated "priority seat". So I didn't sit on it. I sat on one of the other three. Nobody else was sitting down - a train was coming in and everyone except me wanted to get on it - and I could have sat on the priority seat with total impunity. But I am British and therefore have an inbuilt dread fear of being challenged for Doing The Wrong Thing. So I sit on a non priority seat where I can relax in the knowledge that if someone who is a priority person needs the seat it will be there waiting for them. Or if it isn't, it won't be because it's my backside parked on it.

But who is a priority person? I've qualified for this special category quite a few times in my life but with non visible issues. And non visible issues are a nightmare because they mean that you have to assert yourself by asking for the priority seat to be vacated, which means describing your non visible issues to a carriage full of complete strangers, most of whom are at best indifferent and at worst sullen and hostile. I defy any reasonable person to do this. My first non visible issue was the first four months of pregnancy. I may not have been carrying serious baby weight but boy I needed to pee. Constantly. Sitting down was a crucial self protection. But find me someone capable of saying, excuse me can I have your seat. I am four months pregnant and it's making me want to pee like Seabiscuit. Nope, I couldn't do it. So I stood, and contracted urinary infections instead. My second time was after my foot surgery. When I was on crutches, the crowds parted like the Red Sea. When I was in a surgical boot, people instantly gave way for me. Once I was back in a shoe but limping, nobody gave a damn any more. The cloak of invisibility had descended and if I wanted priority access I was going to have to beg for it. So I didn't, and the pins in my heel consequently got inflamed, blah blah blah...you get the picture. So it was only a month or two ago, when it occurred to me, that if I was too British to ask for a priority seat to be vacated by a non priority person, then the chances were that the non priority person occupying the priority seat would probably be too British to argue with me. What Brit would demand my orthopaedic surgeon's number so they could call and verify the state of my disability? Or ask me to strip off my sock and shoe so they could check the scars? So I gave it a go. Hop on the train. Identify non priority squatter of priority seat. Several deep breaths. Excuse me, I squeak. Occupier is deep in his IPhone and is wearing headphones. Oh Lord, this is going to be harder than I thought. I debate my options, and decide to prod him gently in the shoulder. He starts and looks up. Excuse me, I say. He still has his headphones on and cannot hear me. EXCUSE ME, I finally boom, throwing caution and dignity to the wind. He takes off his headphones and looks at me, expressionlessly, while other commuters, startled and indignant, lower their Metros and stare, wondering which category I fall into: a) harmless nutter, b) dangerous terrorist or c) unnecessarily assertive for a weekday early morning. Could I please sit down? I ask, maintaining eye contact and trying not to lurch forward over him as the train makes its bumpy way to the next station. I have a foot injury and I need to sit. Protest and conformity wage a brief war with his facial expressions. Conformity wins. Yes of course, he mutters, gathers his stuff and gets up. I sit. Arrange myself with a triumphant beam reminiscent of Mr Bean. Yes. It can be done.

Camping. Why?

I am making my epic daily march from Charing Cross to my place of work, with 20 minutes added to the on foot bit of the commute due to the ignoble closure of St James Park to the public for the duration of the Olympics. Well, the Paralympics finished yesterday - I know this because, despite missing the closing ceremony, today's papers are full of it, most of them bemoaning the surfeit of Coldplay - but St James Park remains obstinately closed. This, it transpires, is because of the parade, an event which because of the generally unremitting busyness of my daily life, has totally passed me by. But walking the route between Charing Cross and Victoria it is absolutely in my face. If you didn't know anything was going to happen then the miles and miles of steel barriers would be a small clue. But much more intriguing are the small clumps of people, sat on blankets on the ground with thermos flasks, sleeping bags, and back copies of OK! magazine. The parade begins at around 13:30 but these people arrived as early as 5pm yesterday evening and have been there ever since. And here's the thing. Although there are quite a few of them, they are not fighting for space. There is in fact, lots and lots of space available for spectators. In other words, there was no need to camp at all. They could have arrived with the jaded commuters like me and taken up their station having had a decent night's sleep in the comfort of their own beds. In fact they could probably have thrown in breakfast at home, half an hour of Good Morning Britain!, an indulgent muffin from Starbucks,  AND a leisurely walk up the Embankment and still got to Trafalgar Square before the crowds arrived. So what's the deal? Why are you camping, I ask two ladies who look as if they are in their sixties or thereabouts. They are sitting on portable directors' chairs, drinking cocoa. We didn't want to miss it, they say to me, slowly and with eyes widened. They obviously think I'm an idiot. What is it you would be missing at this time of the morning, hours before the parade starts, I ask. They point. All this, they say. I look. Hmm. I can see hoards of fed up commuters, workmen putting up steel barriers, a few cyclists, and...well, that's about it. Where are you from, I ask. Leicester, they reply. Aaah, I geddit. These daily views are my boring bread and butter experience but for those visiting the metropolis this represents the hub of people watching activity. I ask some more people a few feet up. They have just emerged from their portable tent. We're from Brentwood, the guy answers, with a strong Essex lilt. But you could have come in on the train, I say. Yeah, he says, scratching his bottom and stretching his back, which cracks in several places. But it wouldn't have been half as much fun. I am gobsmacked. Nope, I'm not getting this at all. Camping out on concrete streets by choice? I'm missing something here. But perhaps this is not surprising. I have always been neuralgic about camping. Only once was I persuaded to spend a night in a tent. It was in a game reserve in South Africa, and frankly the only thing not mod-connish about it was the tent itself. Otherwise there were beds, heaters, an en suite (roofless) bathroom complete with shower...the works. We settle in for the night. Round about 11pm lions walk into the camp. They stand just a few feet from my head. All that separates us is canvas. I quiver with fear. After a few hours of roaring and making that weird gulping noise that lions do when they are having a bit of a chat, they wander off and in the silence I hear scrabbling. The tent has been visited by rats. Several of them. Over the course of the next three hours they chew through everything, including our carefully wrapped food, our suncream, even the electrical cables, meaning no more light or heat in the tent. Because lions are still in the general area we can't leave. This is the most hellish night of my life, spent trying to bop rats on the head without waking up the kids. We fail on both counts. The next day I freak and pack my bags, the game park manager gets upset and offers us  the honeymoon suite in the lodges down the road which are real rooms, I relent and accept, and we have a fabulous second night which I spend generally reminding people that we now have hard evidence of the awfulness of camping. I think of these memories as I walk past the makeshift tents by the side of the park. I get it. Sleeping on the street is part of the whole experience, and if you wrap yourself in a Union Jack you might even be noticed by the media, be interviewed and get your 5 seconds of fame. Me, I think I will stick to my comfortable Alphabeds mattress and skinny latte. And will watch the parade, which will pass right by my office, on TV later tonight.

Middle Class cycling

I am a keen middle class cyclist. What this means is, that I paid not too much for my bike but it had to be new, not second hand; I don't know too much about how to look after it but I do know of a shop a few miles away that does a damn good annual service; I paid a lot of money for rubber tubes to be put in my tyres so I wouldn't have to worry about punctures; I only cycle when it is not raining, though I am not averse to the cold or the wind, indeed cycling in such conditions makes me feel smug, especially when I sail past traffic, unlike when it rains and I just feel very stupid and have to restrain myself from flinging my rubber-tubed bike over the nearest privet hedge and thumbing a lift. Being a middle class cyclist also means that I force my kids to cycle with me at weekends. And let's be clear about this, I am absolutely conforming to type by doing this. If I did not know this for sure, it only needs a test run along the Open Space path which runs through North London to confirm it. I park myself by a section of brook and while my kids make a swing out of abandoned rope and a hopefully solid looking tree, I people watch. It is a guarantee that if I see a kid cycle by, within seconds he will be followed first by his father. Then by a younger kid. Then by his Mother. If it is a girl, the bike and its accessories will all be pink. If it is a boy, he will be wearing a football shirt, whereas his father will be wearing lycra and his Mother will be dressed in a mix of White Stuff and Fat Face clothing. I abhor Fat Face. It screams middle class urban Mum Who Holidays In Seaton, in the same way, unfortunately,as boden clothes do. And in North London, cycling Mums wear this stuff to project the message that they are not serious cyclists, indeed they would far rather be playing tennis at the private club a few blocks away, but they believe in the importance of Quality Time, and since the little buggers won't be shifted from the Playstation by any other means, cycling it will have to be. Followed by a large gin and tonic. For myself, I enjoy cycling, partly out of fear - in the same way that I never really mastered the roundabout when learning to drive, I never actually took cycling lessons and therefore wobble at the first sign of uncertainty, usually triggered by the need to turn right into oncoming traffic, although I have no problem responding to anti-cyclist road rage even if it means taking both hands off the cycle bar, which I think is encouraging for my self confidence as a cyclist. I  enjoy cycling for the physiotherapy challenge - I am still working hard at physiotherapy, and am utterly lost in admiration watching the cycling in both the Olympics and the Paralympics. It is all I can do to cycle up one hill before having to stop, drink half my water and stretch my calves. Rehabilitation of any kind is a huge  challenge if you take it seriously so I can only begin to imagine what paralympic athletes have put themselves through. I consider myself determined - I put myself ona  bicycle a week after I came off crutches and proceeded to crash instantly and ingloriously to the ground, since my new foot had no idea of gravity, no strength, and was suffering a huge identity crisis after its surgery. Two days later I was back on it, again, again and again, until one day passed when I climbed on and managed to stay on for the length of a street. Oh what a brave person am I. But this is a shadow of the killing effort athletes have to rise to. But mostly I enjoy it for the way it makes me feel when NHS ads exhorting parents to tackle child obesity come on TV. Every cycle trip with my kids involves at least half an hour of shouting, cajoling and bargaining, even blackmailing - first to actually get on the bike, then to wear a helmet, then to cycle a bit further than just the end of our street - but bit by bit, we have built up our routine and now we get some miles under our belts. We come back, pig out on Magnum ice creams, and I feel like a Much Better Parent. It is a middle class win win.

Honey Cake

See, Rosh Hashanah was made for someone like me. I am at one of those perfect junctions where baking and stress meet squarely in the middle. Some people eat chocolate when they are stressed, some people drink alcohol, some people work out, others go for long walks or just retire to bed. Me, I bake. And these days the stress is so intense that I have puddings and cakes coming out of my ears. Blackberry rice pudding, made from late blackberries gleaned from the bushes round the corner from my house. White cake, a Magnolia Bakery cookery book favourite, made only because it takes hours and hours of whisking to make perfect and requires such concentration that there is no space whatsoever for any thoughts, especially not negative ones. And now honey cake. Rosh Hashanah is a time not just for eating honey cake. If you are me, then Rosh Hashanah is a time for experimenting with different takes on the honey cake.  OK, so. yesterday it was the classic honey cake.  Today, chocolate and honey cake. Tomorrow, the spiced honey loaf. See, this is the great thing about being Jewish. And the Lord said, make honey cake so you can have a sweet New Year. And the Jews answered, yes but what kind? There are so many varieties. And the Lord said, stop doing my head in with these details, I have more important business over on the other side of the Sinai. This one you are just going to sort out amongst yourselves. And lo, yet another of a billion debates about the Torah is launched. Communities everywhere argue about the perfect recipe, the one that makes a honey cake damp enough, sweet but not too sweet, perfect with tea.  This year I have offered, rashly, to contribute honey cake with others from the community, to be eaten and enjoyed by everyone after the Rosh Hashanah service. Oh yes, eaten. Enjoyed. And compared. Try this one, it's much damper than the one over there and the texture is to die for...it will be a Honey Cake Miss World. Well bring it on. Nigella's honey cake, does not use honey, which is odd and must be a candidate for misuse of language under the Trades Description Act. The Jewish cookery books recommend all kinds of bizarre additions including orange peel, lemon rind, bits of biscuits...some of them sound as if you make them using the leftovers from your vegetable peel recycling bin. The chocolate honey cake was my own innovation and I have to say it has not gone down universally well. Purists would hate it, kids love it on the grounds that anything slathered with chocolate is a Good Thing.  One day, someone somewhere will launch the Crufts Dog Show equivalent for Honey Cake. Until they do, I will continue to have fun and exorcise my stress experimenting. Pass last week's leftover orange rind, would you?

Pest of the Week

I have been commuting up and down the North Circular Road, Eastbound, to visit my sister who is seriously unwell, most days for the last three months. But even before my sister's illness the North Circular Road has been a major feature of my life, since all of my family lives North East of London and I live in North London. On occasion I have varied it with the M25, or hazarded a route through Holloway (here's a tip from me to any of you considering trying this route: don't.) But the North Circular, "when it works" (you have to say this with an accompanying weary shake of the head to achieve maximum effect) is the fastest direct way to get back to my roots and I have driven it literally hundreds of times. So I was pretty surprised to have a landmark pointed out to me by one of my family, that I have passed every single time and never once noticed. Surprising because it is uniquely bizarre. I was going to use the word quirky but quirky does not even begin to cover it. The landmark is on the Palmers Green stretch, on a street corner, and it is a Pest Control shop. Outside their shop they have a large board that says Pest Of The Week. Underneath there is a removable sign, the kind that you slide in and out, and this one says, The Brown Rat. Last week it said, the German  Cockroach, says my niece helpfully. Underneath the sign it says, to find out more how to rid yourself of this pest, call us on xxxx. I love this sign. It's like an anti-landmark isn't it. Most people look out for ice cream vans, bridges or town halls. In North London, it is Pest of the Week. I draw several metaphors from this. Their Pest may be the Brown Rat. Mine is the arsehole in the burnt orange Maserati who speeds past me on the outside lane, having forgotten how to use his indicators, so preoccupied is he with the demonstration of his sexual prowess via his, um, gearstick. Mine is the juggernaut of a Land Rover with one of those utterly pointless "Baby on Board" signs dangling from its back window (ie, because I have a baby in my car this gives me the right to drive a car that obscures everyone else's line of sight and makes for dangerous driving for everyone on the road except for me. Or, I have a baby in my car so you must not crash into me. Obviously, on the days when there is no baby in my car, crashing into me is encouraged). Mine is the Man in a White Van who talks unapologetically into his mobile phone with one hand and swigs beer with the other, pausing only to stick his head out of the window to stare at your boobs, or those of your passenger. Mine is the leather clad motorcyclist who has only just passed his driving test and is desperate to demonstrate his Hell's Angels credentials before he is out of his motorbiking nappies, so to speak. The list is endless (and overwhelmingly male. I know of course that your pest list could look radically different and feature a heavily female majority, including me quite probably, but that is a matter for you and your blog).  Hmm, the next time I pass the Pest of the Week landmark I am sorely tempted to stop the car, jump out, and daub over the Brown Rat in white paint the words YOU IN THE MASERATI WITH THE HUGE EGO AND THE TINY -----. It would do wonders for their business, and send the happiness quotient of North Circular Road commuters through the roof.

Crunchie bar pudding

My sister is really, really sick. During her latest bout in hospital, all of us around her bed, we begin to talk about food. My sister has always been a fantastic cook. Out of necessity as young girls we had to get dinner together for all five of us as our parents worked, full time, in East London, and would get home dog tired with an evening of paperwork ahead of them. No choice: we had to get dinner ready. So all of us evolved a skill for getting large amounts of food together in record time and throughout my life as a result I have never been able to cook food for less than five people, a habit consistently exploited by my kids. But puddings were not usually part of the mix. It would be Birds Eye custard with apple fritters or neopolitan ice cream from Mr Gold the sweet shop man down the road. How my sister got into baking I am not absolutely sure. But she got into it years before I did, and her skills as a baker were astonishing. So, as we sat round her bed, we began to talk to her about her Pudding Hall of Fame. And it took us just seconds before we got round to her Crunchie Bar pudding. Actually we had a spirited discussion about whether our Number 1 favourite was the Crunchie Bar pudding or the dark chocolate mousse dotted with mini marshmallows, and in fact the debate on that score continues...but in this matter I am on the side of the Crunchie Bar. And here is what it is. Loads of double cream, whipped into a frenzy. Loads of egg white, similarly thrashed. Twelve, yes twelve!! - Crunchie bars. Add egg white to cream. Stir in mashed up Crunchie bars. Scatter more Crunchie bar shards over the top. Put in fridge. Wait until it sets if you can possibly contain  yourself that long. Take it out. Attack. So incredibly moreish is this pudding that one of my kids requested it in place of a birthday cake one year. Talking it over with my sister in her hospital room made me yearn to make it, so I have my crunchie bars, cream and eggs all lined up on the table ready to go. Thinking about why I want to make it so much, there are two overriding emotions. One is the clandestine delight of chopping up so many Crunchie bars. Who eats that many without wanting to throw up!? And the other is about the preservation of a memory. My Crunchie Bar pudding will taste yummy and will be snarfed down by the family within seconds of putting it on the table. But the making of it will be a celebration of my sister's amazing, pudding-baking skill, her ability to generate joy at the table with a pudding like this.

Customer Service. Who cares as long as the food's good.

I have been away on a holiday in Israel, gloriously night swimming in the Mediterranean, slathering myself with mud on Dead Sea beaches, staring uncomprehendingly at the security wall inside Bethlehem's boundaries, climbing on to roofs in the Old City and drinking in unmatchable views of overlapping histories and religions, and eating shedloads of food. Bread. Loads of the stuff. I would fall out of bed and into Carmel Market and come  back with my arms full of flatbread and pita. And a market visit is a must, because it drums into you faster than any other experience, the shift in customer service culture. There is no hallo, how are you, how did you sleep, what can I do for you today. There is just a direct stare, a pinching together of the fingers to indicate to you that you should hold your horses while they serve someone else, or just the bark of "Mah?" Which, loosely interpreted, more or less means, what the hell do you want, and make it quick.  I loved this style. It unleashed my years and years of pent up commuter aggression, all those unspoken frustrations and irritations, liberated into the release of direct, social-niceties-free, give and take of doing business. I want these oranges, how much? No way, I'm not paying that. Nope. What? Five shekels? Fine. Here you go. Cheers. And I am off, triumphant, not in my purchase, but in the successful capture of direct, chit chat free, transaction. In the Old City, a friend weaves us through the Muslim Quarter, winding deeper and deeper through the back streets, till we get to a filthy and unprepossessing looking arch. We walk through it and find ourselves in a cavernous looking space with a bizarre range of birdcages perched on the concrete alcoves, with a din of birdsong and clashes of saucepans. A man wielding a towel approaches us. Can we see a menu, my friend asks. The man stares at us. No, he says. And keeps on staring at us. Our kids, by now used to the style, stare straight back at him, unfazed. He spreads out the fingers of one hand and ticks them off. Falafel, pita, salad, houmous, chips, He says. We look at each other. Yeah, we say to him. Falafel, pita, salad, houmous, chips. We'll have that then. He turns around and walks off. Back ten minutes later with the food. Quite simply THE best falafel, pita, salad, houmous and chips ever. Especially the houmous. And the falafel. And the pita. Why would you want this man to waste precious time being nice to his customers that could be spent more satisfactorily to his purse and his customers' stomachs, cooking up matchless falafel?? There is definitely a moral in there for my commute.

Encounter with the Ex

A few days ago, while I was on the train reading the Times online on my IPad and laughing at Caitlin Moran's latest outspoken rudeness on the subject of, I think it was, combing your pubic hair, a man got on at the station with a woman and two boys. I gave them a passing glance before returning to my personal chortles, and then I stopped chortling and gave them a much closer look. Especially the man. He looked very familiar, and after a few moments I recognised him. This man was an ex boyfriend. He was someone I had gone out with very briefly in my teens, in a relationship that ended, humiliatingly, when he sent his bezzie mate to come and break it off because he obviously didn't have the front to do it himself. I have friends who have their own hard-to-believe stories of being dumped - by text message, with the words "because you're just too fat", or by some other ignominious route, but I have to say that sending a mate to tell your girlfriend you don't want to see them any more, probably hits the jackpot, or at least it's a contender. On reflection, and I have to say this didn't strike me at the time, but it began to cross my mind as I stared, with increasing ill will, at this man sitting opposite me, it probably says as much that is awful about his mate as it does about him. If ever one of my girlfriends asked me to go and meet up with their partner instead of them and do the honours I feel fairly confidently sure I would refuse and would probably follow it up with a lecture about doing your own dirty work. Be that as it may, here is what happened. I was due to meet this guy, who I'd been seeing for a few months, at a station, from where we were going to go to dinner. His mate turned up. I went to dinner with him. He broke the news. We'd got through the starter by the time he'd plucked up the courage. I lost my appetite. He left. I went home and cried on my Mum's shoulder. By the weekend I was over it, though I had learned more than a few lessons from the experience, and among other consequences, I dropped contact with his friend as well as with him. So you can imagine the slight shock of finding myself opposite him. Well, he didn't appear particularly discomfited so obviously he hadn't recognised me. The woman he was with was obviously his partner and the two boys looked hilariously like a mixture of both of them. So, the idea of raising the past and demanding an apology bordered far too much on a cack-handed episode of daytime drama, say, EastEnders, and I'm too much of a Britisher and it would take a lot, even from me, to go down that route. But I did indulge myself in fantasising about it. In my fantasy it went something like this. He recognises me. He says, hi, it's Melinda isn't it? How are you doing? He says this, you understand, because he is a shameless bastard who has not repented for his sins. I tell him I am an extremely important person with an extremely important job. He tells me I seem a bit hostile. I take several deep breaths and then I say something like this. That would be because, I say, I have a mental list of the top 5 Blokes I would Go To Great Lengths Never To Meet Again If I Could Help It, and you are on it. And you might think it's not that big an insult because maybe the other 4 are also blokes who treated me badly in a relationship. But you would be wrong. In assessing who to put on this list I don't just include ex boyfriends. I don't just include everyone I know well, or everyone I've ever met. My assessment includes the hairy bloke in a white van who yelled obscene innuendo as I cycled down the street. It includes the bloke I saw chuck rubbish out of his car window and drive off. It includes the grumpy station guard who wouldn't tell an elderly woman when the next train was due. It even includes the courier who put a "Nobody at Home" card through my door and made me trek to the post office to pick up my package, because he couldn't be arsed to ring the bell. In short my assessment is drawn from millions and millions of people. And your stinking cowardice STILL sounds out sufficiently strongly to put you in the top five. And then I get up and leave the carriage, to the applause of other passengers and the embarrassed chagrin of the ex, who meets his wife's accusing eyes and has no words.  I don't say any of this. I don't get off the train, because it's not my stop and would be really inconvenient for my commute if I did. But I think it, in technicolour and minute detail. And boy, it feels good.

Preparing for the holidays

I have a holiday coming up shortly. For reasons of family sickness the question of whether or not we were going to take this holiday, which we planned months ago and is fully paid up, has been hanging in the balance, but finally at the end of last week we decided we would take it. This decision sparked a flurry of panic stricken activity. Tim was that I used to hop on trains, planes and buses with nothing more than a backback containing one change of underwear and a toothbrush, but oh how times have changed. The acquisition of children and the relative rarity of any trip that does not involve a business justification, has left me totally unused to holiday packing. I look at magazine pages extolling the virtues of "inflight facial rescue packs" or "luxe beachwear" dazed, alienated and not a little intimidated. Should I part with fifty quid so I can have bottles of Jo Malone smelly stuff so tiny that if I overdo it I'll use the lot before I've left Duty Free? I try to make out a list of the necessary but it becomes apparent to me half way down it, that holidays aren't about the necessary. They are about the totally spurious. A list of necessaries includes suncream, mosquito repellent and adaptors. A list of the spurious includes kaftans, UV resistant eye cream, thong sandles, a Kindle, strawberry Tic Tacs, a fourth swimsuit just because it's Sea Folly and looks like a bikini unlike my other three which are functional Speedos and therefore wholly unsuitable for sand and surf; a myriad of hair decorations, most of them involving artificial flowers; ropes of beads with which to accessorise my beach dresses; oh, and beach dresses. I take both lists with me to the awful shopping centre close to my home. I despatch the first one at Boots within minutes. I wander confused around department stores waving the second, folornly. To be sure, beach dresses are in abundance in the last week of the sale, though of course they are the really ratty looking ones that have been tried on and discarded a hundred times and are looking distinctly sorry for themselves. They are packed together on one rail to make way for Autumn's collection, so it takes some effort to prise one off without bringing the whole lot down, and it is disconcerting to be trying them on surrounded by the wholly predictable and unimaginative display of burgundy and dove grey sweaters and suit jackets we apparently cannot do without in our depressing post-Olympic return to the daily commute. There are also quite a few bikinis in the sale, and these look more hopeful: but holding them up to the light and you can see immediately why sales enthusiasts have relegated them to the remainders basket. They may be billed as swimsuits but would fall foul of the Trades Description Act. Pocket handkerchief would be a generous term for the coverage these bikinis would give any self respecting woman, especially one with a figure more ample than that of a stick insect. I give up, dispiritedly, and make my way to the Krispy Kreme station, located incongruously right next to the swimwear (subliminal message: TOO FAT TO FIT INTO THESE? WHY NOT TUCK INTO A DOUGHNUT AND MAKE YOURSELF EVEN FATTER!!) Lingering over my glazed classic with sprinkles on top I come to a courageous decision. I will take my Speedos and my Nivea suncream. I will take three good paperbacks, my trusty shorts and a few block colour t shirts. I will take one dress. That's it. I'm sorted. I am free. I am back in the days of the mini-backpack. I am clearly having a reverse midlife crisis.

White Cake with White Chocolate Buttercream

I absolutely love the Magnolia Bakery cookery book. Never mind that I can't work out the measurements which are all in American. Actually most of this was solved for me by a gift from a friend - two fridge magnets, one with a set of US-UK liquid conversions, and the other for solids. Yay. I am sorted. The Magnolia Bakery cookery book contains some of the most indulgent cakes I have ever baked, and I have baked a fair few. In fact, though I can't rival the Great British Bake Off for consistency I could run rings around the lot of them in sheer volume. To give you an idea, at home my family, and there are only four of us in total, are chomping our way through chocolate whoopie pies, a white chocolate cheesecake dotted with raspberries, and a white cake with white chocolate buttercream icing. Why is it called white cake, one of my kids asks. It's so obviously white that its name seems like a let down. It's not a let down, I explain. It is understatement. The Magnolia Bakery's white cake is a huge effort. It involves ages and ages of whisking and electric mixing to get exactly the right ratio of air bubbles to mixture. Whisked egg white has to be combined exactly right so that when the two sponge cakes rise, they are light and frothy. But the true seriousness of the task lies in the buttercream. And what a heart stopper it is. Three bars of white chocolate and two whole packs of butter, whisked and whisked and whisked, with vanilla essence and a pack of icing sugar, slathered over one cake base, plonk the other one on top, and then slather again. This cake is so rich that, with one slice down you, it's no food for a week as your body recovers from the shock. It is the attrition of all foods. It is, therefore, the perfect special occasion cake. In the past month I have celebrated two 50th birthdays of people I love, and have made this cake both times, covering it with gold glitter to symbolise 50 years. Actually what it did was to give the cake a distinctly 70s, camp, Abba look. It's so shimmery!  Only to be eaten wearing platform leather boots and flares. But I also made it for a 10th birthday decorated with delicate violet flowers, and I made it for the sheer hell of it one Sunday and covered it with chocolate buttons. White cake. It is baking's blank canvas. Go buy the book.