A new life, a new hairdo

I took a decision last year, to change my hairstyle. It came about as decisions to change my hair usually come about - sitting in the chair, waiting for the dreaded question from G, my current hair chopper of choice "So, what's it to be this time?" I hate this question so much that every so often I am provoked into a rage and snarl "Cut the whole lot off", which he then duly does, and I duly regret, for at least three months until the stubble has grown out again. Talk about a vicious circle. So this decision, was the anti-decision. I was going to NOT get it cut. Ever again in fact. I was going to grow it. I was going to grow it so long I could audition for a revival of Jesus Christ Superstar, and so wide that I might even be cast in a revival of a 1970s Barbra Streisand remake. I was going to go Jewfro dammit. G's eyes widen when I tell him this. Go for it, he says, head wagging from side to side, but I bet you it won't last. First sign of stress and you'll be back here BEGGING for a choppy bob. Only it's exactly a year to the day since I took that decision, and I haven't asked for the bob. I have however been back to G for help. I had no idea what an industrial challenge it was to grow your hair out. I thought it grew out obligingly in Jennifer Aniston style layers. No. It doesn't. It grows out the way you put on weight. In all the wrong places. G had to intervene every three months to "cut it back into its growing shape". Let me tell you, if you have curly hair, cutting your hair into a shape that will grow the way you want it to, is like herding cats on a rainy night. And the other thing about growing curly hair is, that you could grow it 20 feet long - you could in fact rival Rapunzel - and it could still come off as a slightly untidy version of Anne Hathaway from Les Miserables. Curls don't get longer and longer. They get rounder and fatter. I step out of the shower, feeling round my back for whatever it is that's slapping against my bottom. Oh right. That would be my hair, which reaches halfway to my toes when it's wet. Slap some conditioner on (and boy you need vats of the stuff when you are growing curly hair), leave it 10 minutes and hey presto, it's bounced right back up to ear level again. Of course one of the benefits is, that when it's cold, you no longer need a scarf. You already have a natural one clustered thickly around your neck. When it's windy it slaps you in the face a lot and because it grows out rather than down there is nothing you can do about this other than use an Alice Band, which I refuse to do because it reminds me of a repressed Geography teacher I had back in the eighties who used to wear skirts of unfashionable length. It won't stay in a bun because it's too thick. It's too wide to be trapped comprehensively in a barrette or a rubber band. A ponytail of curls is a complete contradiction. When it rains unexpectedly I wrestle with the hood of my coat for ages trying to tuck in all the stray tendrils so they don't trickle down my neck. Occasionally I  moan about it. Well, get it cut then, say my exasperated friends. But I can't cut it now. Long hair transforms your view of yourself, adjusts your character slightly, makes you feel, oddly, a bit floaty and pre-Raphaelite. And there's another thing about long hair. Just as in Elizabethan times, long hair denotes health. My sister was diagnosed with cancer 2 years ago and lost all her dark brown curly hair to the Chemotherapy Demon. She died before it could grow back fully. Long hair is a luxury, a gift. It may also be a pain in the arse but it's a privilege. I guess I'll be doing my Timotei girl impression for some time to come.

Punching your weight in the quest for new clothes

Today is my birthday. To celebrate, I decided I would go to Selfridges.  This was a brave decision for me. I am the person who reads the fashion sections of the Sunday supplements avidly, flip the pages looking for the box labelled "It's darling" or "This Week's Must Have" and then freak at the price. This week's must have, a Christopher Kane dress, for £995! A Jil Sander coat, for £1195! A Prada bag, for £895! And it's not like these are special occasion must-haves, birthday must-haves, or party essentials even. Sunday supplements show a new Must Have every Sunday! What kind of person reads You Magazine rather than Tatler or Vogue to find out which thousand pound dress she needs to have - and how is she managing to buy one every single week??? You see? Selfridges is quite obviously way out of my league. Anyone who can walk into Selfridges without a care to their wallet, is someone whose daily life looks very different indeed from my own. And I really have no credible explanation as to my choice of birthday destination, except to say, that in the same way that women manage to give birth, then forget the world's most excruciating pain in the form of labour, so that they go on to do it all over again, and sometimes for a third or fourth time or even more, so it is with me and out-of-my-league department stores. Every few years I go back to see if, well, if I fit it yet. I head in there at around 11, taking in the rest of the clientele covertly. Do I look older, shabbier, or, well, Different? I enter the shop in the bag section and quite frankly yes I do look different as practically every woman in the bag section, and I do not see a single man unless he is wearing a Selfridges ID security tag, is on this particular occasion Chinese, and each woman is clutching at least three bags - YSL, MiuMiu (isn't that the noise a cow makes?), Prada. Especially Prada. I affect a nonchalant glide from bags to make up, trying to exude the impression that I am leaving only because I already have my Prada/Lanvin/Stella McCartney tote, and the one I am currently carrying is Preen's latest, not a purchase from Camden Lock in the sale. Make up assistants in department stores routinely freak me out. It never ceases to amaze me how women who are paid to be ambassadors for skincare companies who trot out the next light touch, must have, easy to apply, one step instead of three, travel safe, foundation/lip colour/cheek colour that doubles up as toilet cleaner or whatever, always seem to present with seventeen layers of foundation. What is that about? No client I have ever seen at their counters appears to aspire to wear that much slap, so why do they? I particularly enjoy the valiant sales patter of a black besuited lady at one particular designer make up concession who is attempting to explain the easy wash off  benefits of their latest mascara. I find this hard to swallow coming from a woman whose makeup has clearly been applied with a trowel, and who will probably require several rounds with paint stripper and a pneumatic drill to take it off again.  I take the escalator to womenswear. I walk through the thousand pound dresses a bit like you would walk through an art exhibition. I mean, surely clothes that took that much effort to make and therefore cost so much, are there to be admired and deconstructed, debated and revisited, but not actually bought, right? I think about the birthday money I have been given by relatives. It would probably stretch to a t-shirt in the Final Reduction rails. All right. I sail back out of Selfridges. I have had my fix of Cinderella You Shall Go To The Ball. I hit the high street and by lunchtime I am loaded down with carrier bags of affordable frocks, taken from rails that scream, Melinda This Is Your Level. And indeed it is. I will be able to wear these clothes without worrying about cost per wear. Without worrying about how I will now pay the mortgage. Without having to have taken out a second mortgage to afford them in the first place. A morning of fantasty followed by an afternoon of shopping reality. It's been a good birthday.

Paunch workouts for women

I have been doing the Matt Roberts Lose Your Paunch in A Month workout. It's not meant for women, it's for blokes with a gut. But this is the post feminist age where gender is no longer an issue and I'll be damned if I am going to opt for the decorous leg raises in the women's equivalent. Paunch workout it is. And it is pretty damn satisfying stuff. I cant say it is doing a great deal for my own personal paunch - in fact, the very first in the series of eight exercises that you are called on to do with increasing intensity and frequency over the four week period consists of doing a side raise while clutching your paunch, which can be deeply dispiriting - I would have put this exercise last, Matt, as there is a huge risk that 10 reps of clutching the Source Of The Problem is enough to send you straight to the doughnuts. But it is doing a surprising amount of my stamina and general ability, which goes to show that if you want to lose your paunch, Matt Roberts cannot in fact help you. The only thing that will lose you your paunch, is a padlock for those doughnuts. One with a key that you can throw away or a combination so complicated you cannot hope to remember it ever again. I do this Paunch workout 4 days a week, punctuated in between with cardiovascular exercise, or treasured Rest Days (which get fewer and further between each week - this week, for example, I only get one, and I have already marked my calendar in joyful anticipation). And each time I do this workout it becomes clearer to me why this is a workout for men and not women. It is nothing to do with the intensity. It is to do with the scope for wardrobe malfunction. A men's workout, it transpires, has you rolling, heaving, planking, twisting and jumping in succession so quick it defies gravity, and your clothes respond similarly. This has never happened to me before. Never before have I had to take so many stops mid workout to adjust my top which appears to have ridden up right up to my chest somewhere between side twists with a medicine ball, and the 30 second plank. Or, pulled my leggings back up over the Offending Paunch, because they parted company with my tummy midway through my 15 squat-and-jumps. Or, readjusted my sports knickers because the 20 oblique sit ups with weights which are forcing me to do an involuntary shuffle forward every 2 or 3 reps, is giving me a humiliating combination of wedgie-meets-builders bum. Do men experience these problems when they do the Matt Roberts Paunch Workout? Is it that they run exactly the same risks, they just care less about them? Judging by the Personal Trainer standing on the next mat, who instead of watching his client gasp his way through a gruelling weightlifting regime, has been staring into the mirror carefully adjusting his beanie and checking out the status of his abs simultaneously for the last 20 minutes, I discount the idea that blokes who work out don't care if their gym gear goes temporarily awry. Well then, either the type of gym gear they wear - notable absence of male clad lycra in my gym, it's all about What-This-Old-Thing-I-Wore-This-Last-Marathon - must minimise the risk of workout related wardrobe malfunction. Or I am doing these exercises horribly wrong. Either way, there is a lesson in there for Matt Roberts for when he next puts together his Beat Your Paunch And Join My Gym For A Million Quid A Month promos.

Escape from Colditz on a sledge

I read Melanie Reid's column in the Times magazine pretty much every week, as do many people in the UK. It is a compelling chronicle of her daily life coping with the physical challenges she has following her catastrophic accident when she fell off a horse. Now wheelchair bound, she describes in detail the minute progress of her gruelling physiotherapy, and talks frankly about her evolving thoughts on the nature of disability. When I read it, my heart aches for her and her open style makes her column a riveting and empathetic read. But when she talks about her physiotherapy I have a glimmer of an insight because I have been doing physiotherapy regularly, and by regularly I mean a minimum of 5 days a week, for at least the last 2 and a half years. The nature of my injury is not in the same ballpark as Melanie's, it is barely on the same planet. I ripped a ligament in my right knee in a trampolining accident 3 years ago, and went on to have unrelated reconstructive surgery on my left foot a year ago. For both I needed to commit to physiotherapy to get the full range of movement back in both the knee, and in the foot. The gruelling nature of physiotherapy is what prompted half of this blog's title - Baking on One Leg started when I was on crutches after my foot surgery and defied gravity by baking while standing on one foot and kneeling on a chair with the other leg to keep stable. The baking was about reaffirming my control, and finding an emotional release at a period when my body was not able to keep me mobile. As I have gone on blogging about baking, meeting strange people on the tube, hugging grieving nurses and chatting with bus mechanics etc, I have also been going about my physiotherapy while holding down a full time job. And this is what I want to say about physiotherapy. Physiotherapy really, really hurts. It is profoundly different from exercise. The difference is that when you exercise, if you feel pain or you  are a bit tired or can't be bothered or it all just seems a bit too hard, you stop. Or you do an easier version. Or you just don't go. Bad night? Skip the gym today. With physiotherapy the equation is a very simple and brutal one. You want full range of movement in your foot again? Do those exercises, 5 days out of 7 minimum, and if you feel pain when you push your flexibility range, you don't stop. You push harder. You keep going, and if you do keep going, you win yourself a millimetre more of movement of your big toe, or your heel bends just that tiny fraction further. And that tiny fraction can mean the difference between being able to get out of bed on your own and being pulled up out of bed by my husband. Being able to on tiptoes in my brand newly shaped big toe is the difference between walking upstairs, and bottom shuffling up them. It is hard bloody work and it reaps results only if you stick at it. I never fail to be amazed how high the drop out rate is at outpatients physiotherapy. People have surgery, then get bored with their exercises, stop half way through, and then hey presto, they only get back partial movement. Or they go on to develop new problems. I have kept up these exercises, tough as they are, through some seriously difficult times in the last year, and my reward finally came with the snow. Not only was I able to walk through it properly for the first time in three years, gripping the ground through my boots with my toes, as most of you will do without thinking about it, but also, I went sledging. Sledging is the ultimate in liberation. Sit on the sledge. Push off. Whizz downhill partly out of control. Out of control!! for a person who has been fighting hard, daily, to get control back, this is a dizzy experience, like escape from an imprisonment of injury.  I head straight for the steepest incline, resisting the calls of both husband and eldest son to go easy. Go easy!!! I have been risk averse for so long it has trapped me. Sod risk. I stick my legs out in the air so they won't catch on the ground, shove myself off and shoot down the scarey slope so fast I am a white blur as snow is thrown up by the speed of my sledge and sprays all over me. Fantastic. Amazing. Brilliant. I pick myself up at the bottom of the slope, something else I couldn't do a year ago without the aid of a stick or a Husband, and want to shout my joy very, very loudly. But I don't. My Eldest is already excruciatingly embarrassed by my very presence on the slopes and I can see why. Every other woman there appears to be in the role of Coat Carrier. The slopes are only there for kids and for their Dads who are covertly competing. Well, maybe those Mums should be reading Melanie Reid's column, and grabbing this opportunity. Because mobility is a huge gift. I've worked hard to restore mine. And now I'm enjoying my reward.

Pistachio macaroons

I loathe New Year Resolutions and generally don't make them. But this January felt like a good time to make a commitment about my baking. I was going to up the ante. I was going to step out of my cheesecake/spongecake/fairycake comfort zone and start making More Complex Stuff. I love making all my usuals, and goodness knows the fan base for them is an ever expanding one - after all, white cake with white chocolate buttercream topped with edible wafer daisies, what's not to love? But baking has never been about the eating for me. OK maybe it is for a slice or two but the alchemy is what has always drawn me. The amazing way that combining ingredients and creating something that looks beautiful out of them, the chemistry involved, and the skill - aside from walks on the beach or a damn good full body massage I don't think there is any more successful way to beat stress than to bake. I absorb myself in it. I made a chocolate cream pie earlier in the week, my first one, made from a classic American recipe I dug out of the internet, and spent so long staring at the chocolate ganache-like filling as the cocoa, milk, cornflour, vanilla and butter came together that it went just a bit too solid and I had to chuck it out  and start again. No, that is a lie. I didn't chuck it out. The kids ate it. It might have turned into a blancmange but it was still delicious. So. I decided to tackle macaroons. Never made them before. These are things I will happily fork out far too much money for at the posh Macaroon pop up store inside Selfridges because they are things of such beauty, and because they have always seemed beyond my skill. Nigella Lawson has a recipe for pistachio macaroons in one of her earlier cookery books - see, no need to keep running out and buying her latest offering, just recycle her older books! - and I pulled it out and gave it a go. The picture of these macaroons shows them palely green and gleaming on a white cake dish, just three or four, exhorted by Nigella to be eaten as a side dish with coffee. Absolutely, I think, looking at the picture, with a coffee in a really really posh cafe, probably somewhere off the Kings Road. I am Out Of My League. I go to put the book away and then pause. You see, this is what New Year Resolutions are for. I'd have put the book back and fallen back on chocolate chip shortbread had I not remembered that I had set myself a challenge and would be a total wuss if I didn't see it through.  So. I separate eggs, and pull out my fave icing sugar (M&S organic, far less dust in your hair than cruddy mainstream alternatives, and as I have a lot of hair this is a serious consideration). I grind pistachios, which I find buried under 4 abandoned packs of dried split peas. I whip egg white. Gingerly I combine the ingredients, spoon out disc shapes on to my baking tray, and leave them, as instructed, for 10 minutes to form a skin before they go into the oven. Magically, this is exactly what happens. I watch over them as one would watch paint dry. I am utterly fascinated by the process that makes this happen even before they have gone into the oven. Then I put them in and make my pistachio buttercream. Easy peasy, lemon squeazy. Butter, more icing sugar, more ground pistachios, whipped and whipped and whipped. I take my macaroons out. OMG. They. Are. Beautiful. I slather pistachio buttercream on them, sandwich one on top of the other, put them on a white plate. Look at Nigella's picture. Look back at my macaroons. They look the same. I have done it. Macaroons are in fact easy. They are not 5 quid's worth of Selfridges pop up store version. All it needed was two things. A recipe. And sufficient faith in myself. Well maybe a third. That bloody minded determination in my DNA that just will not let me  call it a day.

Putting bereavement into perspective

I went to my local hospital this morning for a pre assessment. Nothing serious. I have a meniscal tear that needs clipping. Day surgery, should be in and out, the nurse said cheerily, even though we both knew that was not true - in practice day surgery works like this: 1. Too many people turn up at 7am to check into the outpatients ward. 2. There is a massive scrum as the crowd surges forward to check in early so they get a decent seat in the waiting room, preferably one opposite the telly. 3. The nurses beat back the increasingly pissed off patients. 4. One by one, we are processed, a bit like a herd of cows going to market. 5. We find ourselves seated in a really, really depressing room with light green floors, taupe walls, old people chairs and occasionally, even blood stains on the ceiling. I kid you not. 6. Five hours later, at least two thirds of us are still sitting there. If you are lucky your procedure will take place before 2pm in which case you have a chance of leaving the hospital in the same day. It would be in the administrative staffs' interest for this to happen of course - we know about road rage but let me tell you that road rage has nothing, but nothing, on daypatient rage. After all, a day patient has been instructed not to eat or drink and is therefore sitting on their backside getting steadily ravenous, parched, tired and very, very cross as the blood sugar dips. A day patient has had to swab themselves, no skimping on the intimate areas, with anti-MRSA wipes which leave your skin feeling like cardboard. A day patient has read their back copy of Grazia or Now! at least fifty times and is having serious withdrawal symptoms because they have left their IPad at home. It was that or run the risk of getting it nicked. So you see. Nobody at pre assessment is fooled. My pre assessment nurse may be an accomplished liar, but she is cheery with it and that is a rare commodity in the Hampstead NHS trust. So I go with it. I find out her name, ask her how she is, we chat merrily, until she comes to do my blood pressure. It'll be high, I warn her. It's been high for a couple of months now. She asks why. Because my sister died, I say, holding my breath in a weird reaction to a message from my brain that says, please don't mess things up by weeping. If you weep you won't get out of this place for hours. She stops writing and looks up at me. Tell me about it, she says. I lost two of my brothers and I still think about them. If I'm not thinking about one, I'm thinking about the other. But most days I think about both of them. It still makes me weep. Were they ill, I ask, my own self absorbing grief momentarily suspended by her openness. Yes, she says. HIV. Both caught it from their girlfriends who had picked it up from former boyfriends. I can't tell you, she said, how frustrating it was as a nurse to have two brothers pick up HIV. Which country are you from, I ask. Congo, she replies. It's a big taboo there. One died there, the other went overseas for treatment but it was too late. She stops for a moment and her eyes fill. Then she takes a breath, picks up the pen, and continues with the health check. I look at her, my mind processing what I have heard. Nope, doesn't make it easier to bear the death of my sister. But, anyone who is bereaved may recognise the self absorbing nature of grief. And after all, I only lost her a few months ago. But you do find yourself screaming why me? why us? continually in your head, feeling as if you have been singled out personally for tragedy by whoever controls Fate. Five minutes in the company of a nurse who lost two brothers in the space of a year and still weeps for them, puts my grief in context. A context that reminds me that plenty of other people are in pain. As I get up to leave at the end of the health check, in an impulse I give her a hug. She returns it.

Conversation on the 168 bus to Hampstead Heath

I have been taking walks. Every day this week and next week I have a planned walk that takes in a part of London that is less familiar to me. There is a reason for this. Several, in fact. Primary among them is the need to give my poor overtaxed, burned out brain, some space, not to mention sufficient fresh air, to get itself in order again. But it has to be said that the opportunity of this week and next, presenting itself at a time when the kids are back at school, is irresistible as a time to reclaim quality space that is just for me. It makes me practically delirious to pore over a map of London and decide on my day trips without any reference to child or teen friendly activities, the location of toilets, pasta restaurants, tube stations that aren't too busy etc etc, and deciding on clothes to wear without having to think about getting bits of rice cake down the front of my shirt is akin to a night out on the town.  Small wonder that I have been dressing for these walks as if I were going out on a date. The exciting thing about wandering parts of London on your own, is spontenaity. I would walk up a street, glance to my left, see something interesting and change course. Just like that. No need to ask anyone, suggest it to anyone, sell it to anyone (look! I bet if we go down there we'll find ice cream/art galleries/Tonko the clown/a pub that sells your favourite beer!). I wander down a side street because, well, I like the cobbled pavements. Or a house down near the end looks like it might be worth taking a look. Or I caught sight of a blue plaque. Or I just want to defy the plan and go off on a tangent.Yesterday found me wandering through Bloomsbury, eyes permanently up, because in Bloomsbury lots of very old shops selling things like bespoke umbrellas and period furniture are located over three or four floors and the tops of the buildings are decorated to reflect the wares available inside. Or the date of construction and architect are displayed just below the rooftop. Who knew. Today was Camden Lock day, a time to savour the crowds, check out kooky unwearable kit, inhale the cheap incense, eat unpronouncable food hoping for the best, and getting lost over and over again in the tunnels by the canal. Brilliant. I finally emerged, dirty and triumphant, on Chalk Farm road and on a whim, I hopped on to a 168 bus. At the same stop I am joined at the back of the bus by a woman about my age, and a man who looks to be in his seventies. We begin the usual practice of carefully not engaging in eye contact, but when the bus revs up, as if to get up the energy to tackle Haverstock Hill, we can't resist a titter. The noise at the back of the bus is infernal. This bus is on its last legs, says the elderly man. We nod resignedly in assent, covertly clutching our seats. No I mean it, he says, that noise is the prop shaft on the engine that has come away partly. If we make it to the top of the hill it'll be a miracle. Prop shaft? Engine? I have no idea what he is talking about but it sounds serious. I consider getting off the bus at the next stop but worry slightly that if it stops at the next stop it'll never start again thus doing everyone else on the bus out of their moneysworth. So I sit tight and regard the elderly man, who is looking very dapper, a faint hint of wax on his moustaches. How come you think it's the prop shaft, I say without thinking. I am slightly taken aback at my words. I have no idea what I am talking about, after all. The man looks equally surprised - less so at the human interaction, more I suspect at the prospect of a woman conversing confidently about car mechanics. He begins to explain to me the inner workings of a bus. It transpires that he is in fact a retired bus mechanic. I tell him I am surprised he still wants to travel on the things after years spent fixing them up. More friendly, buses, he says. People talk. Not like the tube. I look at the woman opposite me, who has been listening with every appearance of rapt interest. He's right.  They are. Part of me feels sad for this gentleman who travels on the bus because he is lonely. And part of me is triumphant. Not only have I rolled back the years sauntering through Camden Market as if it is something I do every weekend. I have also had a crash course in bus engines.  I'm definitely doing this again tomorrow.