M&S undies, and their uncanny hold on the nation.

Every once in a while I go to a posh boutique in the 'burbs, one that my Mum has patronised for years, to buy a Special Occasion Dress. The shop is staffed, intimidatingly, by women of a certain age, the type who give you no privacy whatsoever in the changing room, manipulate your boobs into gold trimmed cruisewear, oblivious to your bleating objections, then yell outside, Arlene! Go and get me one two sizes larger! - making you wish that the changing room was in fact a black hole and that you had been swallowed up inside it. When you finally manage to croak from behind the curtain that you Just Don't Think This Is You, they sigh a very obvious sigh of contempt, and say, in a voice dripping with sarcasm, well if you don't like it then off it comes. What they mean is, well if a cretin like you hasn't got the taste enough to recognise that silk lame pyjamas are the last word in cool then you are beyond help. However, they do a nifty line in block colour cocktail dresses and when I manage to struggle into one it generally looks pretty damn fabulous. Except for the knicker line. Don't worry, the sales assistant says briskly, with the right underwear that'll tuck you in perfectly. The right underwear. Would she be talking about those huge old lady pants Bridget Jones held in such abhorrence, that suck all your spare tyres in so that you look fabulous but cannot in fact breathe? If so, then the sad truth is that I wear The Wrong Pants pretty much seven days out of seven. I, along with the rest of the nation, buy my pants at M&S. The packs of three that come either in just black, or just white, or black and white stripes, or black and white dots. They come in huge prehistoric shape through to thong shape. There literally is a style and size for every known body shape. Sometimes they have lace decoration, designed to hide their intrinsic mediocrity. They scream VPL, they are what you grab for comfort and generic invisibleness, they don't attempt to hold anything in - in fact, they take ostentatious pride in letting it all hang out - and they are a wildly successful product. If you want to wear a Cute Cocktail Dress, they are the Wrong Knickers. For the 99.95% of us walking the globe who do not have the perfect figure, wearing The Right Knickers with that special occasion dress comprises indigestion from a mercilessly flattened tummy, heat rash from the Right Knicker lining, and the miserable anticipation of how to get the damn things off at the end of the evening - hard enough to get on in the first place, after an evening of canapes and whatever alcohol, getting them off just feels like more than one's life is worth. Recently there have been several pictures of Beyonce flashing her Spanx on stage, and stories of celebs "triple Spanxing" (I gasped at this one. It took me half an hour to get one pair of Spanx on. How do you get three on? With a forklift truck and several cranes??) but in any case, we are not fooled. Spanx may be the Right Knickers but they are not and will never be, desirable underwear. Desirable underwear is one of a three pack that doesn't mind how many spare tyres it has to accommodate, it just bags out obligingly. There is definitely a message for the marketing specialists in there somewhere.

Chocolate mousse and cancer

OK this post isn't going to be a total downer but here's the thing. When you consider the statistics it must work out that we all know someone who has had cancer, might have it, or is being treated for it. In fact we all probably know several such people. But it so seldom is the case that people tell you that they are one of them. Maybe they don't want to talk about it, or maybe it is that the Big C still conjurs up such frightful thoughts that nobody wants to go there, either on their behalves or for anyone else. Well I am coming out of the closet because I am one of Those People. I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer five years ago, had both my thyroids removed, went on to have radiotherapy to make absolutely sure that no cancer cells had made it into the lymph, was declared cancer free in 08, and ever since then I have trekked to six monthly x rays, blood tests and clinical examinations at University College Hospital. I don't enjoy going. My first two years of appointments induced an unpleasant paranoid fuelled anticipation, which, when I was liberated from it by an all clear, then produced a very scarey bout of retail therapy, ruinous for the bank account when you consider the location of UCH - conveniently close to a million shops on Oxford Street or if furniture is your bent, it's just a few streets up from Heals and Habitat. After a couple of years had gone by, natural human optimism took over and I went to these appointments with calm resignation. Until my most recent check up, which was just a few days ago and prompted this post, my appointments took place in one of the most depressing buildings I have ever had to spend time in, with filthy windows, cramped waiting rooms, and people at all stages of investigation in the one room. I spent my January visit sandwiched between a poor woman who had just been diagnosed with the same aggressive breast cancer that had killed her elder sister, and was being reassured by her shellshocked younger sister; and a young man in a wheelchair with no hair. I felt deeply for both but could not help thinking, look, I have done my time. Can't clinics for post-treatment checks take place at a different time from diagnostics, so that I can be spared the pain of reliving my experience through the trauma of other people? You can see why the whole experience would send me hoofing up Tottenham Court Road in search of the quickest impulse buy. Space NK near Warren Street has been posting handsome profits on my behalf for the last three years. Happily, things have changed. I went for my latest check up this week to the old building only to discover they had moved. To the brand spanking new Macmillan Oncology Centre, a beautiful and fairly intimidating, huge glass structure, with gorgeous men at the entrance there to guide you through the fully automated process of check in. Complementary therapies were available, courtesy of Macmillan, through two huge doors into a space that looked exactly like Champneys, while consultations took place in state of the art medical suites. I plonked myself down on an ergonomic sofa wondering whether I had come for a check up or a job interview. It was quite literally like stepping into the first class lounge at an airport, destination Cancer Country. As anyone who goes for these check ups will tell you, it does not matter whether your cancer is curable or not, whether you have easy treatment or awful treatment, chemo or radio, lose your hair or skip through the whole thing unaffected, there is no leaving Cancer Country. I myself will be going for annual check ups for the rest of my life. So no point in trying to file this away in a box marked Extra Curricular activity. From the moment of diagnosis, living with cancer, or the threat of cancer, becomes an integral part of your life and with limited financial means there is no point in venting the rollercoaster of your feelings on retail therapy - or at least, not after every appointment, if you don't want to be bankrupted. This fabulous new building with its sleek technology, its wifi access, its cafe and its electronic noticeboards which flash up "MELINDA SIMMONS TO ROOM A113" goes a long way towards calming and comforting, and generally restoring the sense of being in control that a threat of a cancer diagnosis generally takes away from you. But my experience of this is that living with the bureaucracy of cancer management needs something in my life to counterbalance it. After this last visit, my response was to haul out the baking goods and find a recipe so complex and so beautiful and delicate that it would take hours to make it, and represent a huge personal triumph once on the plate. Give it up for the Organic Green and Black recipe book and their Marquise au Chocolat, a recipe so complex that three days later I am still trying to figure it out. If I do manage to deliver it looking anything like the picture, I might just pop along to UCH and offer it up to the cafe in the MacMillan Oncology Centre for prize of place.

Olympic commuting hell

Today was my first taste of what it is going to be like to be a London commuter during the Olympics and Paralympics. For reasons best known to themselves, the authorities have shut off access between the station where I disembark, and the office where I work, which is a distance of nearly two miles. I think I tried at least five different ways to get to the park through which I usually walk, including by darting through a slightly disconnected barrier when a security official's back was turned, only to find another line of barriers 50 yards further on. The wide, wide detour I was forced to make, added a good 20 minutes to my commute. All fine and good in sunny weather, but of course this is England, and for at least four days out of every seven it is going to hurl, and those of us who are exhorted to get on our bikes or shape up by walking for at least half of our route, are not just going to get blisters, we are also going to get coughs, colds and pneumonia. There is little reason for cutting off such vast spaces in central London so I can only assume that having failed in their bid to get Londoners to do more sport in the spirit of the Olympic year, they decided to force us to it by shutting off our regular routes and making us take to the streets. Like ants whose march has been disrupted by some careless human stepping on the middle ranks, we all run hither and thither in total discombobulation, searching for an alternative route to the Mother Ship. As someone who has commuted since the age of 9 - my school was in central London while I lived in the suburbs - I like to think I'm pretty savvy about the back streets, but this invasion of my carefully honed route has been comprehensively executed, as many of the back streets are cordoned off too. It's like one of those challenges from the Crystal Maze, only at least they have team mates cheering them on. All I have, all any of us has, is the company of surly commuters, equally resentful and confused, turfed out likewise and seeking their own path home, even if it means climbing over buildings to get there. All you need to throw into the mix is a few hundred tourists clutching maps and asking for the way to BuckingHAM palace for total mayhem to break out. Luckily some things appear not to have changed, including a breakdown in the Northern line forcing me off the train two stops earlier than my destination. I get into the lift and behind me a girl of around 17 steps in. She is texting vigorously on her phone with one thumb, while the thumb on her other hand is stuck uncompromisingly in her mouth. It stays there as she texts, sucking meditatively. She is dressed intimidatingly fashionably so I can only assume thumbsucking is the new Ecstasy. Some feelgood hormone secreted from the epidermis? I watch her doing this and feel really, really boring and square all of a sudden. I decide to do something to exhibit my maturity, and duck into Carluccio's to order a Macchiato coffee. I don't drink coffee - HATE the stuff - and I usually go out of my way to avoid Carluccio's, which is to Mums with newborns what Starbucks was to them in the nineties and is therefore to be avoided by anyone without a bewildered sprog in tow at all costs - but occasionally I am drawn to it, usually by their wildly overpriced bottles of chocolate truffles.I buy my coffee, taste it, grimace, and chuck it in the bin, waiting for the thumbsucking teenager to disappear from view before I do so. Sigh. I really should have bought the truffles.

Handbag revelation

I am the tomboy of my family. While my eldest sister was debating between purple stilettos and white ones, I was ripping my third pair of tartan trousers shimmying up trees with my bezzie mate Russell from next door. Although I did catch up with my sister at some point in my mid teens, I never really made a complete transformation into girliedom, and friends and family would exhibit ritual horror at my periodic appearance in some fashion aberration. A penchant for shapeless black clothes resembling old binliners took hold of me at 18; I wore Doc Martens, defiantly, with my best frocks, well before it became fashionable to do so; but the main bit of my ensemble that remained resistant to the pink and fluffy, was my choice of bag. I didn't get it. What was the point in a clutch bag you couldn't fit anything useful in? All you need, my sister explained patiently to me, is your keys and your lipstick. And your Walkman, a good book and a sandwich, I would say back to her, while she tutted and shook her head with justifiable derision. I remained obstinately in the tomboy world of bags well beyond university, going to jobs clad in neat suits and sporting an uncompromising black backpack. To be fair, my Summer holidays comprised being a counsellor on American camps, trekking through Middle Eastern deserts, playing my guitar at campfires amid a large group of rowdy peace activists, and swinging through trees in European forests. No point in adding to my luggage with frippery shoulder bags when you have a bootcamp to crawl through. No hand space for a bag if you have to lug your guitar on and off trains. By the time I met my husband my favourite outfit was a shapeless black playsuit with weird multicoloured swirls on it, which I bought from a shop thick with incense, from a bloke slumped on the counter who had partaken of one too many downers, and a beaten up bumbag with a CND keyring dangling from the end. The playsuit was eventually discarded for more feminine Frenchified frocks but the bumbag, and the black back pack remained. Increasingly I worked on my "look", which evolved into what I hoped was classic-with-a-quirky-twist, and once or twice I even managed to pull it off, but I remained obdurate about The Bag. You needed your bag to do two things - carry all your stuff; and enable you to go about your business hands free. I have no idea what freak of hormones suddenly and inexplicably changed this, only a year or two ago. Something happened. One day I was looking idly through a magazine while two hours into a three hour wait to see my orthopaedic surgeon, and a picture of a yellow bag catches my eye. I sit up, pore over it, and then register my reaction to it. I really like that bag! It would look great with all my work clothes! It could go from day to night! A week or two later, I owned a yellow bag. And oh Lordie, that was it. A can of worms had been opened. Now let us keep this in proportion. I was at a party earlier this year, sporting my latest addition - a Kate Spade black leather number with fabulous gold zips up each side, chic but noticeable, my classic-with-a-twist bag, recounting my conversion to another woman, who asked me what I spent, on average, on a bag. Umm, about fifty quid, I tell her. She opens her eyes wide and says, honey, you are a long way from Bag City. It transpires that she owns well over a hundred of them and has spent close to a thousand on each one. Nope, I won't be going that far. That is not a healthy bag obsession, that is a shopping addiction. But I continue to marvel at the girlie enzyme that makes me squeak at my uncomprehending family, all of whom are male, oh do LOOK at this fabulous red bowling bag! You don't bowl, they chorus. I sigh. It's the SHAPE, not the purpose, I explain patiently to them. It is the same enzyme that led me to a Lulu Guinness purple perspex clutch in the shape of a pair of lips for my sister's birthday, something I would not have bought for anyone in a million years or touched with several bargepoles, yet I find myself taking it out of its tissue a few times a day and stroking it lovingly. Ah well. At least I still have the 16 eyehole, beaten up, black Doc Martens.

Shabby Gym Chic

I spotted a notice on my way into the women's changing rooms yesterday. Do you want a flatter tummy and smaller thighs? It demanded. Underneath these words was a perfectly formed woman clad head to toe in pricey Nike gym workout gear. I mull over this as I change for my workout. The answer is, as whoever is responsible for the flier very well knows, yes. Of course I want a flatter tummy and smaller thighs. Everyone does. I bet if you asked Kate and Pippa Middleton that question the answer would be yes. But I won't get them, for two reasons. One is, that I am a normal, average woman who likes her food. And the other is, that I will never shell out on expensive workout clothes designed to tighten my legs, firm my bum, and push my breasts out provocatively. In the gym, I am not on show for anyone, nor am I wanting to market myself as a sex object. In the gym, I am a deeply un attractive, sweaty, lumpen mess. I am also comfortable, which, looking around at the women changing into their gear on either side of me suggests, is an objective I share with many other gym goers. I look down at my kit. Really, really old black leggings, dirt cheap from Sports Direct. Ratty black t-shirt. Orthopaedic knee brace (SUPER sexy, right?) the only thing I don't skimp on is shoes, and I have no brand loyalty whatsoever - good shoes for pronating feet are all I am interested in. I read an article last Christmas that exhorted me to invest in new gym gear because it would motivate me to work out. Call me a cynic but the timing - just in time to add, £150 Stella Mc Cartney for Adidas t-shirt, to my Christmas list! Suggests the article was more marketing than sports research. I pad past the Legs, Bums 'n' Tums class lining up to go into the room and I clock that this cohort looks less like Kids From Fame. More like Preppies From Primark. I realise the big brands are turning over billions, but in the real world, guys, we are still pumping iron in our boyfriends' cast offs.

Belgian chocolate, Eurostar, and personal inadequacy

If there is one thing you can count on when you travel to Brussels, it is the presence of luxury chocolate at virtually every stage of your journey. Most hotels in Brussels are either next door to Belgian chocolate shops or they have concessions in their lobbies. The hotel I stayed in last night was one of the more basic ones - furnished with the stark simplicity of a Tokyo cubby hole - and STILL they had Neuhaus chocolate available in a vending machine next to the reception. The Eurostar terminal at Brussels has only 3 shops but one of them is a Pierre Marcolini outlet, Marcolini not just being one of the most fabulous Belgian chocolatiers alive today but also one of the hippest. Cafes serve up slivers of Leonidas with your lattes, and it is on the checkout of every canteen in every Commission building. I love going to Brussels and yes, chocolate is why. I was once a member of the Chocolate Society - a birthday present from years ago, meant as a joke but I took it scarily seriously - and in the whole year of my membership, nothing on their monthly taster menu, from the chocolate praline asparagus stems to the truffled flowers, had anything on Neuhaus Caprices et Tentations, and if you do not know what these are, then go out and buy them, right now. I admit, I am the perfect target market for this stuff. When I was twenty I was teaching English in a grammar school in Cologne and one day I saw a sign advertising a chocolate trade fair. I dumped my schoolbooks and went straight over to the exhibition hall, only to find that it was open to businesses only. Totally undeterred, I came back three days later - on the day of my twenty first birthday, in fact - dressed in a suit I had borrowed from a fellow teacher, carrying a briefcase, and I confidently signed up as the Chief Executive of Meteor Chocolates. Paid my 20DM entry fee and hey presto. Welcome to the Promised Land. I was pitched to by Lindt and Cote D'Or on their new ranges and given huge multipacks of their chocolate to take away. I upended tubs of Guylian chocolate seashells into one of the twenty or so plastic bags I had concealed in my briefcase. I picked off Bazooka bubblegum from the amazing bubblegum house that stood, splendiforously, in the middle of the exhibition hall. It was an unforgettably delirious experience. When I left, every one of my twenty bags was full. My birthday is in January, and I remember eating the very last piece of chocolate on the fifteenth of April that year, and that includes the bags of it that I took into school and used as prizes for spelling bees.Plus it took about another three months before the overpowering smell of bubblegum flavoured chocolate had finally dispersed from my room. Oh, the joy. A meeting at the OECD that I attended some years later wound up with dinner and most of it was taken up by a heated argument between me and the Austrian delegate on the virtues of Valrhona versus Montezuma. So you see, I am indefatigable around chocolate. Luckily I also have a dogged commitment to exercise, which has tended to balance out, more or less, the chocolate intake, particularly until around 3 years ago when a horrible trampoline accident which injured my knee meant I had to give up my favourite training pastime, which was boxing. Boxing burns, like, a million calories a minute, or if it doesn't then it sure as hell feels as if it does. Stopping it was traumatic, and three years on with my new foot and all the physiotherapy I am still doing to get my foot into the world of mobility, I am still some way off the giddy ninja heights of my previous exercise regime. At no time was it more painfully apparent than in my last gym session two days ago. A beefy guy walks up to the mat with a 15 kg weight and proceeds to spin it around as if it were a paperclip. I on the other hand am sweaty from the effort of standing on my toes. Result, I think to myself, as I manage, by clinging for dear life to a handrail, to get my left foot to raise itself by, oh, around half an inch. Then I look over at my fellow workout fanatic to see him balancing his 15kg weight on his head. On his flipping head. OK I could't even do it if I tried - I have a very large bushy head of curls, whereas man on the next mat has no hair at all. But still, I feel like I have failed my gym entrance exam and should slope off home to work out covertly with my sissy 3kg handweights which are gathering dust next to my bed. Oh to be as authentic a fitness freak as I am a chocolate foodie.

Should bras be handwashed?

Yesterday morning, I baked a pear and apple crumble and washed my bras. And yes, I did these things simultaneously. I put the bras into soak. I go into the kitchen and peel apples and pears. Back to the sink to wash bras and leave them to soak in detergent-free water. Back to the kitchen to whizz up crumble mix and pour over cinnamon and clove-infused fruit. Leave it to stand, back to the sink again to rinse out bras, put them in a tub to hang out. Back to the kitchen to put crumble in oven. Hang out bras. There was no temptation to confuse the two - bras in oven, crumble in the garden ho ho - but it did make me pause for a minute. Why oh why do bras need to be handwashed? Well they don't do they, you can put them in the machine wash - at least, you can if you wear those frippery things that only people with an A cup can really get away with no matter what the pictures say - because nasty experience has taught me that if you put an underwired bra in the machine wash, it will invariably come back out with the wire hanging out, having capitalised on the megaspin by staging a daring escape plan involving the systematic slashing open of the wire seam. Not a pretty sight, in fact a fairly disconcerting one for others in the family. Who put this SWORD in the wash, bellowed my Youngest when he was around three. So, handwash equals longevity, and I am all for longevity in bras because buying them is excruciating. It comes down to two options. Either it's M&S (yes, despite my best efforts, there is a theme developing in this blog involving M&S, but what can you do? A shop that is both ubiquitous and relentlessly middle class and middle of the road worms its way into your life no matter what you do to try and avoid it); and the M&S bra experience involves long hours searching fruitlessly through the racks for your size in the one that is not push up, extra padding, extra plunge, balcony (what the hell is a balcony bra anyway? Is that, like, for waitresses who want to be able to carry more than 4 plates at a time??)Or you can plump for the 1 to 1 boutique experience. This almost always involves a woman of a certain age with a very loud voice informing you and most of your shopping neighbours of your REAL cup size, as she feels you up relentlessly and mercilessly, and then hands you the perfect bra, which is almost always "champagne" or "coffee" coloured (ie, brown) and costs upwards of two hundred quid. So you see, I wash my bras not because I have developed any emotional attachment to them, but because the longer I can keep them in shape, and girls we have all been down the street labelled washed out and sagging to your knees, and let's be clear that whether we want to present ourselves as attractive or we just want to be able to reach old age with our breasts in the right ball park, ie above the tum and not below it, so this is a look to be avoided if we can possibly help it - anyway, the longer I can keep them in shape, the longer it is before I have to take several deep breaths and plunge back into M&S or The Dragon Lady boutique. You have some very cool bras, calls my neighbour from the back of my house. Excuse me? I answer - this is after all the first time my neighbour at the back of my house has actually spoken to me in ten years and the subject matter therefore feels just a bit too intimate for a first encounter. Yes, she calls out, while her kids, who were jumping happily up and down on their trampoline, freeze in embarrassment - I love the blue one with the red flowers, where did you get it? I think I might ask my husband to buy it for me. Umm, boutique in Wanstead, cost upwards of two hundred quid, I lie, and back away, collecting up my bras to drip into the bath instead of on to my grass. Ideal it ain't, but it's that or put up higher fences and one doesn't want to disturb neighbourly relations. There are however limits, and I have no desire to become acquainted with my neighbour's breasts. Oh for crying out loud. Maybe if I lose my job I will set up a new market in disposable bras. Wear 'em once. Chuck 'em out. No washing. No embarrassing neighbour discussions. More time to bake apple and fruit crumble. It's a no brainer.

Chocolate fads

Back in the day when I was in my first permanent job, the chocolate du jour was The Mountain Bar. It wasn't that we weren't already familiar with the Toblerone, which had been around a lot longer, was the same shape and frankly better quality. It was that The Mountain Bar came from M&S. The day M&S opened food stores near offices in Central London was like a Velvet Revolution. My team (yes, I was a precocious 23 year old, within months of starting my first job I had A Team, which then went horribly wrong because I was really badly managed and my team started to bully me so I left...but that's another story) would collect orders and go in twos and threes up to Islington Market, ignoring all the fabulous stalls with their locally grown fruit and handmade coconut ice, head straight into M&S, and buy Mountain Bars. Oh the excitement. Once the initial heady feeling wore off we moved on to cheese puffs and from there to Chocolate Twirls. When I look back over my career I have vivid pictures of each of them and they all feature a particular type of chocolate. A phase selling airport advertising is dominated by Yorkie bars. Why, I have no idea, except maybe that it was a place that reeked of testosterone and Yorkies are not, after all, if we sign up to the advertising, for girls. And during my time in public service, it's chocolates for sharing. Maxi packs of Minstrels, M&Ms and Maltesers. Especially Maltesers. Cheap and such great value if you buy the huge box at the back of the top shelf. Occasionally you read articles in newspapers about pernicious people who bring chocolate into work, who the writers of these articles label as "saboteurs". They introduce this unhealthy stuff into your life so it's their fault you are stuffing your face with it. As if you wouldn't find somethign else to stuff your face with if there weren't Maltesers around. In any case, if you sign up to Maltesers theology then they are the healthiest chocolate choice there is so what's the problem? This morning I had finished my laborious physiotherapy session in my gym, was in the changing room getting dressed after my shower, and the sauna door opened. Out of it emerged a strikingly beautiful woman with Latin looking features, who was totally bare except for a pink thong, which was soaked with her sweat, as was the rest of her. She made her way languidly to a bench, stood by it, and proceeded to stretch, so we could all get an unstinting view of her curves and assets. Women around me murmured jealously or looked away as they stuffed their imperfect bodies back into their office suits. I wondered whether the gym company was paying her to emerge from the sauna whenever the changing room was busy, so we could get a glimpse of what we too could look like one day in the not too distant future if we Put In The Effort. If they were, then it was an own goal. Why on earth bother, I said to the woman next to me. I haven't a hope in hell of looking like that. Darling, replied the woman, neither does she. You think she got that body with exercise? She had her last meal at the Golden Jubilee. I agree with her. On my way out, I buy a megabox of Maltesers for my team. This is, after all, the Real World.

Comfort Food on the Tube

Lately I have noticed a recession-related behaviour springing up on my daily commute: comfort eating. Years ago eating on the tube was a reviled habit, consisting as it did almost exclusively of the consumption of evil smelling Wimpy burgers, replaced in subsequent years by equally evilly smelling Whoppers and Big Macs. These days I have noticed that the majority of commuters in the average carriage, will be tucking into slices of cake, fudge pieces, chocolate Hob Nobs, Millionaire bars; and today, a lady opposite me sipped from a thermos of what smelled, unmistakeably, like chicken soup. Austerity is taking its toll in many different ways but this is a new one not yet clocked by the social anthropologists. I watch people tucking into their various stress beating, high GI goodies with not inconsiderable jealousy. The months off my feet have taken their toll on my waistline and while my fellow commuters are unwrapping their shop bought chocolate, I have a litle plastic bag of cut up celery bits that I chew on disconsolately. Frankly I am amazed commuters haven't succumbed to junkfood years ago. The mere experience of dodging mice at Charing Cross station; traversing the Armaggedon that represents the queue for the escalators at Victoria; the stampede at Oxford Circus; tramping the half marathon that is the distance between the Picadilly and the Northern lines at Leicester Square; climbing off trains into sooty Central line tunnels and staggering, traumatised, through the tracks into the blinding light of the next station feeling like a wartime refugee; packing into overcrowded Bakerloo line trains like cattle; or tugging vainly at windows desperate for air to dispel the antisocial smell of a crowd of people who apparently have not had time, or inclination, to wash that day - are all by themselves experiences awful enough to send anyone over the edge. Is that why you bake, friends ask me - is it a comfort activity after the commute that you hate so much? Well, partly, although here's a confession - I bake for the pleasure of producing beautifully smelling food, but I don't actually eat that much of it, and frankly that is just as well as I would be the size of several houses if I did. So no. I don't bake to comfort eat. But it is a kind of liberation. The kitchen is my space, to move around in as I want to, without having to negotiate anything other than a teenager with his nose in the fridge. But it is far more about the need for a creative process that liberates me from the stultifying experience that is the tube ride - no matter how much I try to alleviate it with work reading, social reading, Scrabble or Fruit Ninja on the trusty IPad, I am always relieved to stumble out at my home station. Not so with buses of course - buses are unbelievably slow, a lot like elephants in the way they rumble up roads - but you can jump out of them at any time, and sometimes I do just for the hell of it. No it's just the tube. I need it, I can't get to and from work in reasonable time without it, I know it like the back of my hand, and I hate depending on it. I suspect that when fellow commuters tear into their chocolate bars, they are having similar thoughts. And if anyone reading this is thinking, if you hate it so much, get on your bike, my answer is, with pleasure. Just as soon as cycling in central London stops being tantamount to taking your life into your hands. The day Boris Johnson introduces universal cycling lanes, is the day I eat my Oyster Card. In the mean time, celery sticks will have to do.

Tennis and toast

Like many Brits, I took advantage of the extra long Jubilee weekend, to escape from Jubilee celebrations with a short staycation in the Cotswolds. And very twee it was too, with beautiful houses built from Cotswold stone with roses hanging from their porches, and coachloads of Japanese tourists tramping up and down the main drags of Chipping Campden with their various photo-snapping gadgets. Of course there was no real escape from the Jubilee anywhere in the UK, and the Cotswolds was no exception - in our neck of the woods their celebrations took the form of a concert in the village green featuring some X Factor finalists I have never heard of but who no doubt either hailed from the region, or were a bit low on celebrity-propelling gigs. We are a frazzled family at the moment, between long working hours, school exams, increasingly hellish commuting whether by tube or by bus, and general administrative chores taking their toll, so we were all in need of a break. One of the nicest things we managed to pack into the weekend was tennis - we are all pretty indifferent at it but most of us enjoy the attempt. Playing tennis with only one working foot presented several logistical challenges, not least a mental wrestle against my basic competitive urge which says, go for it! when a ball goes wide. Schooling yourself to go only for balls within your immediate range is a pretty counter intuitive exercise for the best of us, but I like to think of it as a key exercise in discipline. But even being able to hit balls from a more or less stationery position beats sitting with your leg in plaster and your foot on ice, so it was pretty damn tremendous progress, and I am a strong believer in banking progress, no matter how small. And frankly, any exercise was a necessary after the enormous breakfast of which we had availed ourselves at the B&B where we had spent the night. Scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, croissants, pancakes, hot chocolate, cereal, fruit, tea/coffee, and toast. We despatched the lot. Except the toast. Funny thing, toast. How you like your toast is an intensely personal thing but if you can rely on one thing in B&Bs it is that by and large it will arrive cold and crumbly. Perhaps this is just inevitable. After all, timing is everything in the cooking of toast, and if you leave it for longer than a few seconds you have lost the window of opportunity. That is just too long for restaurants and cafes, so perhaps the answer is just not to have toast when eating out. But given the wide variation in performance of toasters, gadgets which seem to have personalities and lives of their owns, the challenge is not that much smaller at home. Our toaster broke recently, and when I replaced it we all went through a crisis. Number 3 in old toaster yielded perfect toast; number 3 on new toaster yielded charred remains. Perhaps the only way to have perfect toast is via an open fire, toasting fork and tongs. In which case, we should probably all give up and reach for the Pop Tarts.

Chocolate purism

A bunch of friends who have had many opportunities to partake of the fruits of my baking frenzies, recently forwarded me a rash of recipes featuring Nutella. Taking the hint, I spent a happy afternoon re-creating Nutella cupcakes with Ferrero Rocher, Nutella cheesecake, and Nutella and hazelnut cookies. Obviously it was all blindingly delicious, and it inspired me to go chocolate shopping to find other kooky chocolate variations to bake with. A tough challenge, that, as by this time (8 years and counting of increasingly obsessive cake production) there isn't much out there that hasn't been tried. So I make my way to snobby, chi chi St Johns Wood, which harbours shops with weird and eclectic chocolate variations. Triumphantly I seize some obscure Japanese brand purporting to be a marshmallow and strawberry chocolate concoction; Reese's peanut butter cups; and some weird African mint cracknel thing that explodes in your mouth when you bite into it. Excellent. Adventure sated, I make my way to the shelf of Lindt chocolate, which is showcasing its newest kid on the block: Wasabi chocolate. Now here's the thing. I am not brand loyal in the slightest and I'm open to new experiences, but Wasabi? Is that strictly necessary? I get the whole salted caramel fad, and I could just about stomach chocolate with chilli. But wasabi is a disgusting green paste you smear on sushi rice. It is not a taste of comfort/reward/gluttony. I ignore it and head home with my purchases, picking my way through the residents of St Johns Wood, the male half of which live in some kind of time warp where people wear deck shoes without socks in the middle of Winter. And it's not the no socks bit that jars. Deck shoes??? In central London? In 2012? Lacoste makes a fortune in St Johns Wood, I'll bet. Anyway. I head back to my much less expensive, far less fashionable, rather grittier, nook of London, with my purchases, to gloat and fantasise about my next version of cake. Or would do, if I could concentrate over the competitive chatter coming from my neighbours outside my door, who are trying not to argue about the food they should be eating at the huge Jubilee lunch that they have been planning for weeks. Older neighbours advocate for 1950s food - difficult for the younger neighbours, who were born well after the 50s, to imagine, let alone deliver - and younger neighbours argue for Eton mess, strawberries and cream, pavlovas and trifles. Actually I don't remember them arguing for any other food than desserts. I hear one of them argue that it would be an excellent occasion to make food that is just, well, a bit experimental. I look out of the window. She is wearing long, flowing robes and lots of jewellery. A thought occurs. I stick my head out of the window. How about chocolate wasabi cake, I suggest. Her face brightens. Genius, she says. Do you have a recipe? No, I reply, valiantly injecting regret into my voice, but try Lindt chocolate. There you go, marketeers of Lindt. As for the local residents who will be partaking at our Jubilee lunch, I would stick with the trifle.