Baking, and adolescence

I am making chocolate truffles. I am making them with the finest quality dark chocolate I can find on the high street (currently one of the Montezuma varieties); espresso coffee; honey; and cocoa powder. The first step you take when making these truffles, is to melt the chocolate, very slowly so that it does not burn. Good quality dark chocolate takes on a molten, shiny, dreamy consistency, like a brook lapping its way over stones and pebbles. Melting this chocolate is a mesmerising experience. Inhaling the cocoa smell, taking in the dark, reflective glow, and watching the melted chocolate drip slowly and deliberately off the back of a teaspoon, unlocks a memory bank in my head. It's my baking equivalent of that moment in the Harry Potter movies when wizards stick their wands to their temples and extract fine, hair like wraiths of memory and bottle them up in test tube bottles (why is it that wizards always seem to have test tube bottles about them? Is it like Mums who are never without wet wipes?) And it performs the same function for me - to relieve my aching head of overflowing memories. Why is it so overburdened right now? Because my youngest child has reached adolescence, an important coming of age moment in his life, and because he is my youngest child, I have been wreathed in memories of his early years for days now. I stir the chocolate, stare at my reflection in it, and see pictures of him in the sheen. Blonde curls. Zonking off to sleep on my shoulder, milk dribbling down the back of my sweater. Looking on at his brother in delight as he got on with the serious business of playing with his trains. Fumbling with a hardback toddler sized book. Falling over and screeching about it for hours afterwards. His first day at primary school, looking so unbelievably tiny compared to all the older kids as he came out at lunchtime clutching his book bag. Making a huge fuss of learning to ride a bike. Good stuff and brain wrenching stuff. Serious illness, and extraordinary achievements. All that in such a seemingly short space of time. I add the honey to the chocolate and ponder the next stage of his life. The chocolate changes sheen and I imagine him sitting exams, maybe going on to further study, or quitting and going into business, or travelling. Or dating (yikes). I add espresso to the mixture and it turns viscous. I turn the heat right down and stir, carefully and firmly, so that the mixture turns into a dark chocolate cone. I take it off the heat, add vanilla, stir again, and leave it to cool. I put it in the fridge, and on the door is one of his early drawings, with a poem about a kiwi. It has been there for years because I love it so much. It describes the black kiwi seeds as "dark, mysterious pearls". Dark, mysterious pearls. A bit like what I hope my truffles will turn into. What will his future turn into? Gosh. I cannot wait to see it.

Buying bras

M&S. That's it, isn't it. You want bras. Go to M&S. It's such a bore. Going to M&S to buy a bra is right down there with doing the weekly food shop, picking up your dry cleaning, or getting your teeth professionally flossed. You have to wear them...it's important to get them fitted properly...flesh coloured ones are the easiest to pull on at 6am in a dark Winter...M&S have the best value, and the occasional frilly bit in the cleavage kids you into pretending you spent hundreds at La Perla. Yaaawn. Wandering between the rows upon rows of padded, non padded, balconette, extra large, teenage starter, black, black, black, white, white, white, flesh, flesh, flesh, occasional red or garish purple and pink, makes me lose the will to live. I don't know. If I'm having to wear one of these things day in and day out, shouldn't there be just a bit more joy in the purchase of them? I don't feel that way about buying a dress or a suit or a pair of trousers or a skirt, I even enjoy buying my gym gear more than this. Why feel this way about buying a bra? Recently I signed up to Secret Sales, and since doing so I made two bra purchases - a Triumph red bra, 60% off, and a Berlei balconette affair, 70% off, rendering ridiculously priced boulder holders into a bargain basement array of chesty prettiness. And my oh my. Opening the boxes was a treat. There they nestled in expensive looking tissue paper, with their delicate lace and their beautiful satiny texture and their message of, Breasts We are Here To Love and Hold You and Make You and Your Wearer Feel Fab. I fell totally in love with them. Much in the way I would with my favourite Assertive Business Suit and my favourite Feel Sexy at Parties outfit. I know some of you are thinking, why don't you just splurge at Agent Provocateur if you feel this strongly? Answer: because I, and I'm guessing quite a few others, neither fit their bras, nor would want to, not least because you need to take out a mortgage to buy them. Nope. Women with, let's say, more upstairs, want to feel as beautiful wearing these things as women who are all brawn and thongs, and we don't want to be paying obscene amounts to feel that way. When I was younger my Mum would take me with her to a small boutique that smelled of violets, on the corner of a main road somewhere between Woodford and Wanstead, which sold lingerie. Not underwear, mind. Lingerie. Bras that hung from beautiful padded hangers. Pants that hung from hangers, even. Individual dressing rooms with vases of flowers in, to try your bras on. Coffee coloured ones, and soft baby blue ones, and beautiful rose pink ones. The place exuded femininity. Not sex. Womannness. It is one of my favourite adolescent memories. A woman of a certain age dressed in discreet coffee coloured two piece jersey outfits, would look at your chest and pull out, confidently, bra upon bra, each one a gauzy, beautiful confection, and send you off to the dressing room to try them. I would alight feeling like Cinderella going to the ball. Contrast that with your shopping trolley in the aisles of M&S. Pick up your t shirt bra while buying your Maris Piper spuds. Most of these boutiques have died a death, thanks largely to large stores selling value undies. Those that still exist are staffed by the same kind of lady wearing the same kind of outfit, selling beauty and confidence. The last one I went into, which was one I stumbled on quite by accident, was when I wanted to buy a beautiful bra to wear in hospital. Try and understand this. I was going to have a major operation to reconstruct my foot. I was going to spend four days attached to tubes feeling disgusting, being washed and fed like a lab rat. I wanted to wear a beautiful bra to remind me of my humanity, of who I was. The woman behind the counter understood this perfectly. You want comfort, she says. And one that isn't too brash. But has a subtle beauty to it. She brings out the perfect one. I wore it in hospital. And it did  worked like a charm.  Mass producing bras homogenises femininity. I choose boutiques smelling of violets.

The Secret Garden

The station that I travel from yielded an unexpected surprise a few weeks back. Clever commuters know exactly which carriage they want to get into, which door they want to leave by, how close they want to be to the exit when they alight, where the nearest fire escape/escalator/extinguisher/ are, and plan their steps accordingly. I always used to be a back of the train gal. If I wanted to go to Victoria tube station which meant changing on to the Victoria line then that meant getting out at Euston/Bank branch and although there were many exits, the absolute best one, the only one to take if you wanted to go to Victoria, was the one at the back end of the platform because it wasn't a general exit it was a special one, like a secret tunnel, that went straight from the Northern Line to the Victoria Line so that all the riff raff not taking the Victoria line wouldn't get tangled around your feet...you get the idea. So for quite some years I would head down the steps on to the platform straight to the back end of the platform, ready to leap on to the last carriage, but not near the last doors as they don't ever open at Euston because the platform's too short. (I know. Let's not go there.) But recently, the organisation I work for moved offices, and Charing Cross became my new destination, and if I want to be precisely opposite the exit at Charing Cross, or even at Leicester Square so that I can add in an educational walk past the National Portrait  Gallery, the place to be is at the front end of the train. Not the very front mind, the perfect place is the single door at the end of the second carriage. So. On the first day of my new commuter route to Charing Cross, I come down the steps at my station and instead of turning right to head to the back end of the platform, I turn left and walk towards the front. It's a suburban station so it's not underground, and it's got a retro canopy over half of it which is quite cute and then the rest of the front of the platform is out in the full open air. And there, I discover, the most dazzling garden. It's amazing. It is mostly planted, with a riot of purple, yellow and white flowers and flowering shrubs. But it also has random, beautiful handmade pots, some of them disarmingly chipped or lopsided, containing purple pansies or forget me nots. In between the grass plants, there are rattan animal figures. A hedgehog, with pansies growing out of its head. Little straw pigs with violets growing out of their backs. The fence is adorned with bits of fired pottery with half finished purple designs, and there are bits of purple and lilac ribbon rippling in the breeze, and even some kids' pictures that have been very simply framed and hang in the backdrop. A discree and dusty sign half hidden in the foliage proclaims that this station has won awards for its garden. I'm not in the least bit suprised. It's so beautiful it should be in guidebooks. It probably is in a guidebook somewhere bent on dragging tourists to lesser known parts of London. It lifts my early morning spirits in a way that nothing else could. I cannot believe I have managed to miss it, every day for the last however many years. Admittedly, a station platform is not like a shopping centre. You don't wander up and down it looking at people and shop windows. It is completely functional. You go to a platform in order to leave it, ideally as soon as possible. Most days I gallop across it, if the train is already there and the doors are open. Now, every working day, I arrive a couple of minutes earlier, so that I can head over to the garden and take in this feast for the eyes. It reeks of nostalgia. It conjurs Frances Hodgson Burnett (of The Secret Garden fame, for you philistine non readers of brilliant retro childrens fiction). It reminds me of a scene from The Railway Children. In short, for a few brief minutes it kids me that I am not on my way to join the hamster wheel that is the Career Superhighway. I might just as easily be a Land Girl, or on my way to sell produce at the nearest Farmers' market. As an exercise in feelgood deception it is a runaway winner. Every station should have one. The tube would be a lot happier place to be if they did.

A foot that does its job

So, I started this blog when I was off sick from work for over a month after having reconstructive surgery on my foot. It's been just over a year, and I still look down at it in mild surprise. Recently, as more loyal readers will know, I had my garden levelled and redesigned, and I have the same feeling when I look at the garden as when I look at my foot. It is as if someone made off with the old one while I was asleep and replaced it with someone else's. OK it wasn't quite that simple. I have been doing physiotherapy for an hour nearly every single day. In a world of commuting, travelling, full time work, family commitments, socialising, domestic chores and general hubbub of London life, an hour of physiotherapy is an unthinkable commitment. I don't know how you keep it up, is the constant refrain from my mates. But then you wouldn't would you? Because if you've never been in a situation where you have had a new foot attached to the end of your leg that then has to be taught every single thing a foot needs to do - point the toes, flex the toes, turn the heel, roll the foot, walk, run, jog, crawl...well, if you had to build from scratch, as I did, you would also put in your hour a day. So. Over a year later and I still find myself standing in the street staring down at my left leg to the consternation of commuters all around me. I'm still in a state of appreciating just how far I have come, that I am able to walk down a street steadily, even rapidly. But what an extraordinary learning experience it has been about the subtleties of biomechanics. I've fallen off my bike, for example, three times in the last month. Why is that? Well, because each time I have had to do an emergency stop because some Neanderthal in a fast car has decided that He Alone Owns The Road. Such an emergency stop would not make anyone else fall off their bike, but I do. And this is because when you stop suddenly on your bike your feet provide the stability on the ground. But my left foot is only around 99 percent stable. The one per cent that is missing, is the tiny millimetre further of range that my big toe needs, to do its job of stabilising the rest of the foot when you are on your tiptoes. Think about it. Big toe doesn't work? Tiptoes are impossible. Who needs to be on tiptoes? I do, when I make an emergency stop on my bike. One person's optional extra is another's difference between safety and injury. So I'm still doing physiotherapy. Up and down the swimming pool on tiptoes. Ages on one of those weird vibrating machines in the gym that makes your head rattle like a Tom and Jerry cartoon clip. Endless calf raises on a step with dumbells for extra challenge. Watching The Voice standing on a wobble board, or not watching it because I have my eyes closed to challenge my stability further. Hopping for minutes on end on the trampoline. Physiotherapy is not dignified work. And it's painful. But you keep at it for the reward and the endless message of hope that each millimetre of extra mobility gives you. Are you someone who is battling an orthopaedic injury? I am here to tell you that hope is in sight. It's just that progress is not given you on a plate. The day I manage to complete a bike ride without knee bruises, is the day I find a new Everest. After all that hard work, why stop at just cycling?

Chocolate buttermilk cake

I have made so many chocolate cakes.  A Nigella Lawson chocolate cheesecake recipe was the beginning of my baking obsession, around 10 years ago. I made the bloody thing at least 15 times over before I plucked up the courage to make anything else, mind. But once I'd turned over the page, fingers trembling, rolled up my sleeves, taken several deep breaths, and gone for the malted chocolate layer cake, I was away. That was it. I bake a lot of different cakes - fruity ones, and zesty ones, and vanilla ones, and coconut ones, and alcohol infused ones, and South African ones, and retro ones. I always come back to the chocolate cake in times of crisis, much the same way as always wearing blue when I feel least secure about myself (Blue. My Signature Colour.) The highlight of my usually PACKED weekend is the precious couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon that I devote to experimental baking, which usually means, finding another way to bake the perfect chocolate cake. The most perfect chocolate cake I ever baked has long been Nigella's chocolate sour cream layer cake with chocolate sour cream icing. It's so rich I tend to scatter chocolate shavings over the top and leave it at that as the sheer effort of whisking that much butter loses my appetite for anything more indulgent. But yesterday it was toppled from its pedestal by the Magnolia Bakery Chocolate Buttermilk layer cake with vanilla cream icing. What an extraordinary creation this is. For starters, once you've trowelled on your icing, of which the recipe makes enough for 5 cakes never mind 1, and then put your second layer on top of that, and then slathered more icing on, and then piled the top with Maltesers (my invention, that one - I was unstoppable by that point), the whole thing is around 3 feet tall. The ooh factor for scope alone would have any patisserie chef weeping with choco-lust. I am sure there is an obvious scientific reason why buttermilk creates so fluffy a cake compared to the dense fudginess of a cake baked with sour cream. I have no idea what the chemical reaction is. I just know that when I'd finished it, I put it on the table where it towered above the plates in disdainful, regal splendour, and I stared at it. I stared until my tea went cold, which kind of misses the point if the purpose of chocolate cakes is to be eaten. Here's why it's my new winning chocolate cake. Because it takes incredible effort to make. You need to whisk and whip up the ingredients for a minimum of 2/3 minutes per addition to get the cake itself to be as light and frothy a crumb as it should be. You need to whisk the butter for the icing with the sugar for AGES to get it so light that adding the flour and milk mixture, which ought to make it dense, instead gives it texture. Such duvet like texture in fact that when you put it on the cake it rolls slowly to the edge of the cake and then...hovers there. Almost like in a cartoon. And when you cut into it it doesn't collapse. It continues to hover. It almost defies laws of physics. Making this thing is not just baking a cake. It's a cathartic anti-stress exercise. It requires every brain cell to time the preparation exactly right if you care about consistency, and after baking hundreds and hundreds of cakes it's safe to say that I do care. It takes single minded commitment. I even switched off my IPod to make this cake. It is my new Everest. Or it was, until my family and friends snaffled it in seconds. Yay. What a winner the Magnolia Bakery Cookery Book is in my world. And why wouldn't it be. It's been put together by a determined bunch of multitasking women. It's tailor made.

Fantasy swimming

I have to pick the time of my daily exercise at my local gym with great care. The clientele changes radically on the hour, and nowhere is the impact more profound than in the swimming pool. The pool is overrun during rush hour peak times, which are at 6am till around 8:15 am, and from 5pm till around 7:30. I'm a morning person and I make damn sure that I don't attempt to get into the pool till after the first rush is over. This is a complicated process. It means I have to go to the office first, eat my breakfast, making sure I've planned it carefully so it doesn't turn into 3 croissants from Paul (has anyone noticed how  TINY and INSUBSTANTIAL their ridiculously overpriced croissants are to anyone who has not yet had their caffeine intake?) Instead I carry around a portable porridge pot, complete it with hot water from the office kettle, down it, digest it while catching up on my email, then grab my bag and go. Just as I get to the gym, the pool is emptying while the jacuzzi is bulging. If I swam with the sharks, as it were, the pool would be heaving. This is not a big pool so more than 5 people in the fast lane, and I ALWAYS pick the fast lane, constitutes overcrowding. I pick the fast lane, by the way, as a statement of feminist aspiration. If I swim in the fast lane, generally speaking I just about hold my own, I'm usually overtaken but at least not spat at or socked in the eye with a contemptuous foot belonging to the butterfly stroke-beating person in front of me. Also the fast lane is dominated by men. Any part of life dominated by men may as well have a neon sign over its door saying, MELINDA, COME AND HAVE A GOOD OLD BASH AT OUR GLASS CEILING. If you swim in the peak period, it's dog eat dog. It is a jungle. It's kill or be killed. It's....I'm out of comparative metaphors. Basically anyone who swims at that hour is not doing it for exercise, they're doing it for competition. They are there to beat You. They have no idea who You are or how long you train for or what your issues are. They don't care if you are way faster, or so slow you should be wearing water wings in the toddlers' section. You are fair game and there to Be Destroyed. So the Fast Lane is like feeding time at the Zoo. You dive in, find your prey, annihilate them and move on. Occasionally I'm sucked into this Lord of The Flies scenario, I even enjoy it on the rare, so very rare, occasions when there might be at least one person in the fast lane slower than I am. But mostly, this is a counter intuitively stressful way to start the day. No wonder they all end up, floppy and panting, in the jacuzzi afterwards Exercise is supposed to release endorphins, not turn you into the Incredible Hulk. If I am to survive this, hold my own - then I have to transport my imagination out of the gym pool and into the Olympic Aquatic Arena, standing on the starting box next to Rebecca Adlington, or some other famous Olympic swimmer, waiting for the starting gun. It's not a gun any more actually, is it. A beep. Much wimpier than a gun but presumably starting guns were banned by the EU, along with straight bananas. Anyway. The beep goes! And I'm off!  A smooth dive, I'm first in the water, Adlington in the next lane striking out making use of her incredibly broad shoulders, but ah, I have broad shoulders too, in fact I've been broadening them for YEARS, and I inch ahead of her, just an inch, and make the wall and tumble turn without getting water up my nose and choking and spluttering which is what would definitely happen if this were not just a soap opera in my head, and I start swimming back the other way, and Rebecca's almost head to head, there's just millimetres in it, and we are supporting each other, after all we want the Brits to win Gold AND Silver, but at the same time we are competing too, and with seconds to go I push with my last reserve of energy and....I've done it!! Gold!!! Kate Middleton gives me my medal, and that's a huge disappointment as I was hoping for, well, someone just a bit fatter if I'm honest....and that's it. I'm out of the fantasy. But it's more than enough to create an adrenalin that lasts me for most if not all of the lengths that I need to do in this pool packed with Neanderthals; it helps me keep pace and thus book my rightful place in the fast lane. I'm not jeered at, kicked or intimidated, I have struck a blow for Women In The Fast Lane, quite literally. Or, I just arrive at 9am and have a nice, quiet glide.

Doc Martens and me

I have had a lifelong love affair with DMs. I was a tomboy from a very early age, and always craved clumpy lumberjack boots while my sisters were easing their way into white stilettoes. The minute I made it to tertiary education I was into my first pair of DM's - black buff leather with multiple yellow eyelets - and I wore them with everything. Short skirts, long skirts, smart dresses, grungy t shirts and cutaways, shorts, swimsuits, sleepwear, the lot. I wore them out again and again - don't believe that PR guff that DM's last you years. That only happens if you're a supermodel and wear them once to a Vogue party and then not for another 6 months at least - although it is the case that you can replace the evil smelling weird rubbery soles if you haven't totalled them too much and most times I had worn them to holes, totally beyond repair. But hey, the upside of this meant I got to experiment with different colours, fabrics and shapes. I went through a bright red phase and a bright blue phase and a purple phase. Then they brought out the flowery ones and my happiness was complete. It stayed that way until one day in my early thirties I was standing in the tube wearing my flowery DM shoes, and the doors opened and a crowd of pre-pubescent girls got on, half of them wearing flowery DM boots, and one of them caught sight of my shoes, and her face fell. In that moment her flowery DM boots became TOTALLY uncool, because some ancient female commuter had defiled them. I took the hint and gave them away, and for a long time, that was it. But then Nigella Lawson exploded on to the scene with a clothes swap session with Caitlin Moran. One look at Nigella wearing brief denim shorts and patent leather DM shoes with yellow eyelets and I was sold. Back on track. Straight into the DM store, and five minutes later out again, the proud owner of black patent leather DM shoes with yellow eyelets and all. Nigella is older than I am, and frankly away from the cameras she probably wouldn't be seen dead in the shorts, the woolly black tights or the DMs, but it's too late. They are back in my life, and teamed, somewhat rebelliously, with my Angela Merkel style black trousers and boxy bright jackets that I wear for my Euro meetings (there is an explicit dress code for Brussels meetings, but that's a subject for another time - it requires me to summon sufficient will to live...). The moment when I stand up from my chair after a meeting, walk round to hand over my business card or shake someone's hand, and they look down and see their reflections in my bovver shoes, is a moment to treasure, over and over again.

Tube Drivers

I was so struck by the driver of my Morden via Charing Cross train this morning that I nearly forgot to get on it. This has never happened to me before, ever. At 6:30am it should be a surprise to anyone that a commuter is capable of noticing anything, even a nuclear bomb, let alone the driver of their train. But I do. I've taken an interest in train drivers in the last couple of years for two reasons. Firstly, because a recent civil society campaign prompting professionals to stop ignoring office cleaners/canteen workers/menial labourers of any kind has really struck a chord with me and I am proud to say I not only say hello to all the security guards, cleaners and coffee providers at the office where I work, and the gym where I work out, I even know their names now. And the names of their children. And what they think of the coalition government, immigration, benefits, minimum wage, and Top Shop. I'm not kidding. Three years of living in Africa kind of nukes out of you the inbred quintessentially British characteristic that limits your interaction with total strangers to one piece of information only. It is not uncommon in Botswana to spend a good 10 minutes at a supermarket checkout sharing each other's family health problems. Shocked the hell out of me when I first got there. Now I chat so chummily at my local Tesco checkout that I have caught my prey fingering their security button with a distinct air of nervousness. So that's the first reason. The train driver is going to get me from A to B, the least I can do therefore, is pay attention to who is going to get me there. The second relates to the rising trend by train drivers to engage in an endearing one way conversation with their passengers. Does Transport for London make a point of hiring drivers with an arch sense of humour? If so, it's working. Last week the computerised voice on our train announced "This Train Terminates Here" two stops into my commute. Disconcerted commuters groaned and started to gather up their belongings. "Ignore her" said a voice over the intercom, " she's had an aneurism. This train is going all the way to Kennington. Take it from the horse's mouth". Two days ago we were stuck in a tunnel. "You may have noticed we have come to a stop" said the driver over the intercom, "even those of you with your noses in your IPads will probably have sensed a distinct lack of motion". Brilliant. The next generation of stand up comedians is currently keeping the Northern line going. So, I take an interest. When my train pulls into the station I take a quick look. Today's pick throws me completely. Firstly, the driver is a woman. I don't know the statistics but I'm telling you as a daily user of an average of 4-8 trains over a 24 hour period, that female drivers are rare. They also, by the way, tend to be a lot less humorous and a great deal more business like. Female drivers are the ones you can hear, all the way from the end carriage, yelling at Control to find out What The Hell Is Going On As The Passengers Need To Know. Your life is safe in the hands of a female train driver - or at least, it is more predictable and infinitely better informed. Though I do tend to miss the vague, dreamy announcements that run along the lines of, we are being held at the station for a while, I really haven't a clue why, but beats being holed in the tunnel at 35 degrees. Anyway. The driver is a woman. She is also quite the most stunningly attractive women I have clapped eyes on in a while. She has raven black, shiny, wavy hair, pulled back loosely from her head. She has a high arched forehead, huge eyes, perfect skin, beautiful dangly earrings, careful but not over the top make up, and slim tapered fingers. I'm amazed I managed to clock all this in just a few seconds, but I'm a commuter and commuters learn to absorb loads of information in just one glance. All that "be vigilant" stuff is paying off, you have No Idea how much. So my jaw drops. It shouldn't really, should it. Why shouldn't a beautiful woman buck the trend and drive a train? Because the only other time I've seen it happen is in movies. Debra Winger, driving a combine harvester. Sandra Bullock, driving a bus. It is such a singular sight my mind, sluggish in its pre-coffee state, struggles to process the information. It takes so long about it I stare at the open doors instead of walking through them and only the warning beep brings me to my senses. I leap on at the last minute and take a seat. I wait for an incident so that we can hear our driver's no doubt perfectly modulated tones. But the train glides effortlessly from stop to stop.  Maybe it, too, is mesmerised.

Commuter footwear

As soon as Spring shows its reluctant and inconsistent face, the dilemma begins. What do you put on your feet to travel to work? I do know of people who persist in wearing boots even through a 30 degree heat and who claim that their feet don't sweat. They are lying, as anyone within a 10 feet radius can tell them if they could only remove their face masks for long enough to do so without asphyxiating from the whiff. But in any case I'm not one of them. I wear boots with my suits and dresses very happily all the way through the Winter. But for the last week at least the temperature has hit double figures and that is the time to jettison that most hated women's garment of all time - tights (no garment more hated in the history of footwear, other than, perhaps, the corset) - and reopen the existential worry about what to replace the boots with. In New York they don't have this problem. Rain or shine, snow or heatwave, women happily don their Keds and trip their way to Grand Central Station. How they manage to pull this look off without looking frumpy and hopeless remains a mystery to me. I think it could be that if all women wore Ann Taylor Loft two piece jackets and pants with their Keds or Converse or Nike women or whatever the latest NY commuter footwear trend is, then it doesn't look so weird. But also, it's not so easy to take your example from NY women commuters. I mean, these are the same women who are in the gym at 4am and out on the street with their lattes by 5 looking as fresh as a daisy. I'm not exaggerating about this one - I know this from experience. I was in NY staying in upper Manhattan for a meeting a few years back. I got up at around 4 the day after I arrived, crippled with jet lag, and decided it would be a really good idea to go and swim some lengths to restore my equilibrium. It'll be empty at this time of the morning, I thought, grabbing my towel. I get down to the pool and find a sea of female Speedo clad, perfectly formed, buffed and manicured bodies. It was one of the biggest shocks of my life. No, London commuting women cannot compete with that impossibly high bar. We are the ones with chipped nails, shaggy hair, thermos flasks and weeping mascara. So, what is a girl to do? I have experimented with leather Converse shoes with black short socks. These make me look like an alarming Amazonian PE teacher. I have tried just wearing my gym shoes. These, when I wear them with my work dresses, make me look like I have had a bad day at the Krispy Kreme outlet. What is it about gym shoes that look so right with shorts and lycra, and so horribly wrong with daywear? Fashion magazines are having one of those delusional fads they tend to have at least five or six of each season, and this one is about convincing us that even Victoria Beckham is wearing sneakers with her dresses. I don't buy it. Problem is, I'm too vain not to care about it. You would think it wouldn't matter at all what people look like in the train to work. But it absolutely does. I think it's because it's at least 30 minutes sat opposite a row of 8-10 people who have nothing else to do so they stare at you. If they're going to do that then the least you can do in return is look like you made an effort. And this pressure is as nothing compared to what you want to look like as you walk into, and out of, your office.  It is completely anti-London to wear sneakers to work. Even if you had a flashing sign on your head that said, THESE ARE FOR MY COMMUTE, you would not be immune to career-ending raised eyebrows over your footwear. So the answer is to search out and purchase footwear that is clumpy enough to withstand whatever the tube may throw at you - overcrowding, unwanted groping, unexpected train breakdowns, delays, malfunctions and accidents (call me paranoid if you want but I never descend into the tube without adequate preparation for having to exit it again, at speed), while still surviving the Acceptable Office Look. In the summer, this would be open toe shoes (not sandals! That is Too Woodstock!), which have that trendy t-bar schoolgirlish practicality, but with just enough of a heel to save the legs from winning a Best Lumberjack competition. Such a pair of shoes is one in a million and requires an exhaustive search of department stores and internet. Is such effort really worth it, I hear you say. Hell, yes.

Lemon, ginger and hayfever

I rocked out into my magical new garden this morning all ready for phase two of my attempt at reliving The Good Life. Carrots, spring onions, peas (only about a million of them - that new frost resistant seed variety from Suttons is a lot more resilient than I had been planning for...), lettuce,  mixed leaves and loads and loads of tomato seedlings all advancing into fragile, tiny baby plants; courgettes,  chard - yes, I have been pretty enthusiastically buying and propagating vegetable seeds.A new garden will do this to you (as will middle age).  Actually grief will do it to you too. Something about planting and seeing things grow, just like going for long walks breathing in the air consciously and listening to birdsong, helps to rebalance my aching head and heart. This is a bit of a sidetrack from the theme of today's blog, but whatever, here goes - grief throws out my centre of gravity. A trigger that reminds me of my loss can literally take my breath away, make me reel, confuse my thoughts, rob me of my appetite, my sleep, my composure, even my will to live. So it would stand to reason I guess that creating things, which is what is going on when you grow vegetables successfully, and I do have a bit of a hit and miss track record but this season looks like being more hit than miss - restores my gravity, reminds me that things go on living and growing alongside loss. Right, that is it for the sidetrack. Now for the real story of today. I rock out ready to transplant my tiny plantlets into individual mini posts from my propagator (loving how professional I'm sounding - truth is I really don't have a clue beyond what it says on the packet). Half an hour into my transplanting I begin sneezing. Six or so hours later I have dispatched two full boxes of tissues and my nostrils are inflamed. A discomfort turns into an Addams Family style nightmare when I take time out from blowing my nose and wiping my streaming eyes, to rub lemon into two sides of cod ready for baking. Then I rub Vaseline on to my bright red nostrils, and only a second too late do I remember that I have not washed my hands first. Lemon on raw nostrils! Aaaaaaargh! My nostrils are on fire. In fact that incident was three hours ago and they are still traumatised. I have never before suffered from hayfever and I bitterly resent getting it now, minutes into spending unspeakable amounts of hard earned money creating a garden I can grow industrial quantities of vegetables in. I fill the sink with cold water and dunk my nose in it for as long as I can without losing consciousness. Finally I figure I am going to have to find an activity that is both pollen free and sufficiently challenging to take my mind of the fact that my nose is twice its usual size. I pick up the lemon again and look at it. Lemon. And ginger. A time honoured combination. I make a curd. Grate fresh ginger. Flour, egg etc and we have a lemon and ginger cake, moist with lemon curd and lemon juice. I pull out a tub of cream cheese, combine vanilla and icing sugar, grate lemon zest, and smear it over my cake. In a last minute impulse I pull out some dark chocolate, and grate it over the top. This process has taken about 40 minutes from beginning to glistening, cake stand completion. And I have not sneezed once. There is a very obvious moral in there.

Chocolate, chocolate and chocolate

I ezperienced a primeval need to bake today. The reason? I was due to visit a relative in hospital. The hospital she was in, was the same hospital as the one my sister spent so long in during her mastectomy, her cancer treatment, and is the place where she died. The day she died I was there for most of the morning making arrangements to have her death certificate completed, to have her body released, and to make funeral arrangements. Let us be very clear about this: I never in a million years could have imagined I would find myself doing this. I went about it so numb I could barely feel my fingers. I imagine that it was shock. I sat in the cafe on the second floor of the hospital, calling the funeral contact, speaking to clergy, liaising with doctors, dialling the morgue. When I had done everything that I needed to do at hospital, I walked, propelling myself automatically to my car, thinking just one thing: I never, ever want to come back here again. I drove away with the very strong sense of leaving a nightmare behind me. Grief takes people in different ways and for me one thing I have never lost is the huge antipathy towards the hospital where I watched my sister slip away. Now I had another relative there, and I suppose I should have worked out that it would have happened - the majority of my relatives live in that area, and that was their local NHS hospital.  So, I needed to go back and yet the idea was horrifying, not least because by some appalling coincidence, my relative was in the same ward as the one my sister had done a stint in. Cruel, to be forced to revisit these memories, but something that I needed to become inured to. So I decided I would need to prepare myself with as much feelgood factor as I could possibly generate in the morning, before setting off to the hospital. I went into the kitchen, opened a recipe book and pored over it. Chocolate. That was the answer. There is just not much more comforting in life, than melting chocolate in a bowl over a saucepan of slowly boiling water (why would anyone forego this pleasure by melting chocolate in a microwave oven???), and stirring it slowly while it melts, glistens, and takes on that molten, shiny texture. In the early days after my sister's death I would somtimes come into the kitchen in the early hours, unable to sleep, take out chocolate, and melt it, stirring and staring, feeling the therapeutic effect of it. I would melt it, stare at it, and then go back to bed without making anything with it. Just to do the melting procedure would relieve my head enough to allow me to feel fatigue. Today I melted chocolate, and turned it into chocolate cream pies. They were beautiful, tiny and glistening. I thought about the hospital, took several deep breaths, and took out more chocolate. Melted it, slowly, stared at it, saw my vague reflection in it, and turned it into chocolate oat crunch, to be sprinkled over, well, anything really. I scraped it into a container, sat at the table, and thought about the hospital. Got up, took another bar of chocolate. Melted it again, slowly and mesmerisingly. Turned it into double chocolate fridge cookies. I thought about the hospital. I felt the image of it reduce and insert itself into a manageable corner of my head. That is better, I thought. I looked at the vast array of chocolate bakery goods. I took a few and wrapped them in foil, popped them in my bag. Beats grapes any day, I thought, as I grabbed the car and house keys. It's a win win.

Cycling is for the brave

My newly reconstructed left foot has been through several hundred rounds of physiotherapy and it is almost, almost there. Not quite. My left toe, straighened and properly aligned with the line of the foot for the first time since my teens, is still restricted in how far it can bend. And that makes cycling a little bit of a hazard. If I have to make an emergency stop on the bike, and frankly if you cycle on the road your life is one emergency stop after the other - idiots who open their car doors without looking first, drivers who pull out of side roads without looking first, or in the case of a pair of hooligans who trailed me last week, people who wind down their window and shoot at you with a water gun just for the hell of it - and if you emergency stop you need to put your foot down confidently to stop yourself from falling off the bike. My toe does not do the job I will bet most of you have no idea it does, which is to lead off on balancing the entire foot, and because it lacks that one tiny but pivotal function, it means that whenever I make a sudden stop on my bike, I fall off. It is very tiresome. The trick is to cycle sedately enough not to have to stop at speed. Sometimes I cycle so sedately on my local towpath that people pushing buggies overtake me, which would seem to defeat the object. But cycling at speed can be a real hazard and not for the most obvious reasons. I do not think I realised until I started cycling regularly at weekends, once I managed to get enough flexibility back in my foot to be able to get on and off the bike, how many plonkers out there see cyclists as fair game. My reference a few sentences back to the pair of colossal Neanderthals who thought it would be funny to shoot me between the eyes so I couldn't see anything, were driving a hire car at the time. In other words, they rented a car deliberately to drive around picking off cyclists for a laugh. Like, this was a credible pastime for them. And on the towpath, the number of dog walkers who derive their daily hilarity intake from exhorting their dog to "kill, kill" when I cycle past them is pretty staggering, particularly since on the whole larger dogs tend to take their owners at their word and make a beeline for me at worrying speed. At which point, sedate cycling goes out of the wiindow and I am competing with Chris Hoy to outstrip the enthused Doberman. I have been reading the almost daily articles in the Times which is running a very laudable campaign to get people cycling in the city, with a certain grimness. Article after article dredges up sports celebrities who insist we are all fatter because we take public transport and if we all only cycled to school or work then the UK would not have an obesity problem. Maybe not. But I cannot help noticing that all these advocates appear to be either mostly men, or the very few women who step up are competitive cyclists who presumably cycle on Olympic tracks andn do not have to run the gamut of men who see women on bikes as fair game. Yes, every single obnoxious incident I have encountered has been perpetrated by a man. And it is interesting that my partner, who cycles in teh same area as I do to more or less the same places, has not experienced a single incident. Well, it won't stop me cycling locally. But it certainly stops me from cycling as a commute. Never mind dedicated cycling lanes, we're going to have to get cycling police on the road before I turn up to my place of work on two wheels.