Luggage

I joined a Board of an international bank a few years back. I hadn't been on a board of anything as posh as a bank before - just a few scuzzy charities, some student movements etc. But I figured a bank was the real deal and I had better dress the part. I fished out some smart grey clothes, and shopped for some restrained Mac eyeshadow pots. I put it all together with my smartly bound papers and briefing notes and looked around for an appropriately businesslike receptacle to put it in.  I searched through my cupboards and the spare room and the loft. All I could find was a battered backpack, a pair of huge family suitcases and an old shabby leather thing so preposterous it defied description (and, for clarification, definitely not something I brought into the relationship).  Eventually I decided that since the meeting I was attending at this bank was only for a day, then some over the shoulder holdall thing would do, I would shove it under the table and nobody would see it. The next day I pitched up at City airport, beautifully dressed in a smart two piece suit, my IPad and briefing papers in my green Kate Spade bag, and then slung over it was a filthy once-cream coloured Shanghai Tang beach bag, purple on the inside, containing 24 hours worth of beauty products, PJs and change of clothing. They won't see, they won't see, I told myself everytime I glimped this horror hanging over my shoulder. I walked into the boardroom of the bank and stopped short. Every other person there had an immaculate mini wheelie. Mini wheelies. I never even knew such a thing existed. It immediately became clear to me that Luggage Maketh the Man (not to mention the Woman). Particularly once it became clear we were all going to be put up for the night at an impossibly staid, high end hotel, complete with marble and appalling piano playing at the brass-laden bar. This was a hotel where the women wore mink furs and had Russian accents. Positively nobody checked out with their belongings scrunched into a scruffy beach bag. I spent most of my overnighter in a hot blush. It was the first time in my life that the quality of my luggage meant anything to me. How had this happened? It was truly incredible that stepping up to a new institutional environment made something as otherwise innocuous as luggage become a career defining issue. Suffice to say that the minute I was off the plane I headed for the nearest luggage shop and got me a black, swish, mini wheelie. After which I had no problem feeling right at home in the overheated board room with its high tech individual powerpoint screens and its high end biscuits. Luggage.maketh the capitalist.

Baking therapy

As I was building my fabulous meringue chocolate semifreddo yesterday (of which, more later) I was listening to a programme on the radio, one of those multidimensional newsy shows that segue neatly from one apparently shallow topic to the other. It sounds frippery but if you listen closely enough, you pick up unexpected gems. This was one of those. This was a segment all about baking, and was telling us what dedicated and enthused bakers like myself already know, which is that it can provide huge therapeutic benefits. Then they cut to an interview with a bunch of people, kids and young people mostly, who attend a regular baking group. What these people all had in common, was bereavement. They had all lost someone they loved, a grandmother, sibling or parent, and baking was a way of helping them manage their grief. Speaking as someone who in the weeks after my sister died would routinely find myself in the kitchen at 3am sieving flour or melting chocolate just to be able to mesmerise myself out of the pain, this struck immediate chords. Something else struck me too. One of the kids said, I lost my Dad two and a half years ago, so we are just coming down the hill. Really? There is something as logical and predictable as a hill in all this messy bereavement experience? I dunno, I am in the second year of my loss and if there is a hill somewhere I have yet to climb it. I characterise my loss more like what I imagine someone feels when they've been lost in the harshest of deserts for so long they can barely remember what water looks like. But on the other hand, as I listen to some of those kids recount memories of their loved ones at the same time as talking you through the cheese an onion quiche dough they are kneading simultaneously, perhaps it is nothing like as harsh. Perhaps after a year or so, it becomes more like a comfort blanket. You prefer to exist in those memories, you bury yourself in regret and in past experiences. My parents had a friend once, when I was much younger, who had lost his wife, like, 12 years previously or something. And all her clothes were still hung up in their bedroom. He hadn't touched a thing. He was a truly lovely man, I treated him like an  honorary Uncle, and I remember thinking how touching and romantic it was, and what depth of character it demonstrated. But wasn't there also something in there about just preferring to live in that cocoon? The truth is, I thought to myself as I folded my crushed meringue into my whipped, chocolatey double cream, that moving on is such a massive step, it takes such immense energy, and it needs you to work so hard at repackaging that past experience so you know where to put it in your new life that you will now go on to live without that person who used to share a part of it with you, that just going day to day with memories in the front of your head is just, well, easier. More familiar. And I am sure there is a nice big chunk of denial tucked away in there too. I don't think there is necessarily much wrong in living your life in your past. I have a hard enough time tucking away all the years I had my sister in my life and moving on, and it's not straightforward, and it can be really hard some days, and I am still having quite long periods where I will find a photograph of her somewhere and find I've spent most of the day sitting there staring at it. I just would rather imagine that she would prefer me to get on with it. Getting on with it, isn't about forgetting someone. It's about taking a slightly unsteady leap into a new future, your memories tucked safely away for you to protect, rather than live through.  When I sieve flour, whip cream, melt butter, add espresso coffee to chocolate and watch it catch and come together; whenever I roll truffles, blind bake a perfect pastry dough for an onion tart, whisk a million eggs for the lightest white chocolate icing ever, create the many layers of almond and egg that make up a frangipane; it creates a space for me to envisage that future, and make it more real, consequently less scarey, and crucially less guilty, to step into. Work does not provide this space. On the contrary, when I work it's a vehicle for obliterating these thoughts entirely. When my sister was really sick I worked stupid hours. Anything to displace the pain. And frankly, washing, ironing and vaccuming don't do it either. There may be people out there for whom ironing is a creative process but I do not count myself among their number. I pour my semifreddo into a lined bread tin and put it in the freezer. It is beautiful. It shines and froths and I cannot believe it is going to be 7 hours before anyone can try it (this is why it is my first time making one of these things. Instant gratification is what drove me to bake cakes in the first place and a semifreddo is the antithesis of instant gratification. Seven hours might as well be seven years when your taste buds are awake). I am dead pleased with myself for pulling off this new recipe, experimenting with it a bit, and working through a bit, just a bit, of the regret and guilt that continue to haunt me. Baking is never just about the cake.

Commuters are depressed

I read some research today that concluded that people whose daily travel exceeds fifteen minutes are more depressed. I really hope the people who did this research were not paid to reach this conclusion as any one of the millions of people who approach the tube each morning and evening could have worked that one out for free. I won't amplify on the usual stories of rude people, bad mannered people, people who sneeze over you and wipe their snot on their jeans, people who ogle you, people who won't give up their seat for a pregnant woman or maintain a studious obliviousness to a less mobile person who gets on a busy train and clearly needs a seat. Instead I will relate to you what happened one just one commute, my commute home this evening, as a sample of this source of misery. I descend into Charing Cross station. It stinks of pee. Someone walking past the entrance I am descending into, flicks a lit cigarette end down into it, and it hits me on the side of my hair, singeing it slightly. En route into the tube station I pass a man with straggly hair, unkempt clothes and a beer can. Hallo sexy, he mumbles at me, dribbling slightly. I head for the ticket barriers. A man cuts in in front of me. A man behind attempts to tailgate me, thus avoiding having to pay for his fare. I thump him with my elbow (a maneouver I have spent years honing. Plenty of experience. That's the key). I walk down the escalator. Politely, I encourage a tourist to move out of the way so I can complete my walk down. I head through the tunnel.  A registered busker is blasting Phil Collins covers with an untuned electric guitar. I narrowly miss my train, the doors of which shut uncompromisingly on my nose. I walk up the platform to await the next. A mouse scampers over my feet. Then another follows. They disappear under a bench with fragments of crisp packet in their teeth. The next train arrives. I get on it. The only seat available is next to a woman in a mini skirt and boob tube, eating a chilli dog. The man on my right is listening to music with crap headphones so we all get to critique his musical taste. The train crawls from stop to stop without explanation. We get to my station. Hundreds bundle out. People coming down the stairs knock against people going up. It is pouring. I tap my Oyster card against the Reader but it isn't working. I retrace my steps, go to the ticket office, get my card checked. Back to the reader. Tap the card. It works. I walk up the station exit past an unkempt man clutching a beer can. Hallo Sexy, he mumbles. Commuters are depressed. Are you surprised????

Egg White

You read food writers like Nigel Slater who talk gaily of pulling out some lone ingredient they've found in their fridge, like, totally randomly, one Sunday afternoon, and hey presto, they've turned it into a blanquette de veau for two complete with the right wine. For years I used to read those types of foodie stories the way I used to think about Cinderella getting her man - nice for a fantasy, ain't never gonna happen in the grim real world. But stealthily and slowly, and without me actually noticing, I have started to do this. Except I have no boundaries, it turns out. Yesterday I came home from a particularly protracted and bitter commute through some particularly appalling weather. I lurched into the kitchen, opened the fridge, and found a bowl full of egg white. I have no memory of putting this egg white in the fridge. Until very reently I would have tipped it down the sink, even a reconstructed foodie like me. But this lot went into the fridge, and on an impulse, I pulled it out. I leafed desultorily through some cookery books but in my head I already knew that this was going to be about Meringue. I whipped the lot up in a classic meringue recipe and tipped the lot onto a tray, spreading it out with a spatula. An hour later I took it out of the fridge, and contemplated it. I had no cream in the house so a Pavlova was out of the question. I did have a bar of Galaxy, however. I melted it, and drizzled it in a cross cross pattern across the meringue. Then I foraged some more and found an old pack of shelled pistachios. I toasted them. Chopped them up. And scattered them over the meringue. Honestly, I could have dispatched the lot myself in seconds. As it was, Family was more than happy to do most of the dispatching. But inexplicably, I hadn't worked the egg white thing out of my system. I got out another few eggs, separated them, whipped the yolks up with butter, whipped the egg whites to peaks, threw together flour, vanilla, rum and melted dark chocolate, combined the lot and poured it into a cake tin. Took it out 40 minutes later, moist and chewy looking. Melted more chocolate with some butter, turned out the cake upside down, and spread the chocolate all over the top and sides. Mixed a bit of coffee into the chocolate icing. Pulled out a bar of white chocolate. Cut it into shards. Threw them over the top. Put the cake in the fridge. All this before I'd even thought about what we were going to have for dinner. Awwwww! It's  like that moment when you've been learning a language for years and finally one day you wake up and realise you have just had your first dream in Sanskrit (or whatever the language was). This was all the proof I needed, that I had metamorphosed into Nigel Slater. Only a slightly more obsessive version.

Tube Strike encounters

I worked at home on the first day of the tube strike. But it was a 48 hour strike and even the most diligent of homeworkers knows that after a very short while the lack of face to face interaction can seriously undermine your marketability. The time it takes for your colleagues to conclude that you have died a death and can safely be replaced is alarmingly short. Anyway, for whatever reason, mostly stemming from guilt if I am really honest, I decide I need to make a heroic effort to get into the office where I work on Tube Strike Day Two. I find to my initial pleasure and surprise, that the line on which I usually travel to central London, the Northern line, generally thought of, not without some reasonable justification, as the most godawful tube line in the history of underground travel, is in fact the best performer in these days of adversity. In fact it is the only one running trains at anything even remotely within the ball park of a normal timetable. So I hop on the first one, which is not my train, but I am a seasoned commuter and those who fall in that category know damn well that when travel goes belly up you take the first train that makes an appearance and stake your chances. So I do this, and to my consternation  I find that although the Northern line trains are running surprisingly well, the Northern line stations are not. Most of the ones in Central London on the branch I need, are in fact closed. Including every tube station within a 2 mile radius of my office. So, sighing, I hop off at the nearest one, which is about a half hour walk away, I take one look at the gridlocked roads and the massive queues of feral commuters at bus stops, and decide, along with, by the looks of it, a few million other people, to take to the streets and hoof my way to the office. It is an interesting exercise in psychology, watching how people get about if you take away their central artery ie the Tube. On the face of it, if breakfast TV is to be believed, we are all hardened and flexible at the same time - we have resilience borne of years of tube strikes which as we all know have no discernible impact on anyone except the poor buggers like me who pay the equivalent of several mortgages for the privilege of using it - and therefore we also know our way around sufficiently to deploy innovative, alternative routes. We walk, cycle, or zig zag across London on buses or even tuk tuks. Taxis move desultorily around the main stations but they have few takers. We are not that stupid - we have already paid once for a service that is not running, so it is hardly likely we will pay again for the privilege of circumventing it. But what the television cameras ignore, is the psychological anarchy. Half the population comes under the heading of VERY CROSS. These people think, for whatever reason, that their presence at the office is indispensable.  This may be for a very good reason, not least that they are not permanent staff but paid by the day or the hour and if they don't show up, they don't get paid. So I am not knocking the motivation. But the behaviour can be a little scarey. These are the people who, if they walk, will ignore every red pedestrian light, hop between speeding buses, jump in front of bicycles, run into the path of several cars, tread on toes or shove you into the road to get to their destination. I am not one of these people, who freak me out completely. Very important not to get caught in a crowd of VERY CROSS commuters. I take to the back streets, mostly along with people who fall under the second heading of RESIGNED. These people have worked out that no job is worth getting yourself killed for; that, if it means less hours in the office, you will find a way to make those hours up (working Mums often fall into this category, spending most of their lives making up lost hours one way or the other); and consequently these people do not just move more slowly an considerately, they also manage to summon a smile. These are also the people who stop half way for a coffee - well why not? No point in arriving looking like the total mess that the tube strike has reduced you to. I hop into a Nero, which I love because I am a slave to their Buy 20 Coffees Get One Free offer, and because they make a mean  latte, even if it does cost the earth - and I order a skinny latte. A guy behind me orders the same. I steal a look. He looks back at me. He does not look like the type of guy who favours a skinny anything. He and I wait at the end of the barista station to pick up our drink. He asks me where I have come from. I describe my 5 mile walk. We laugh quite a bit about it. Then we are affectionately abusive to rail unions, the tube, Boris Johnson, the Tories and the opposition. I pick up my drink to go. He then invites me to stay and drink our lattes together on the famed Nero sofa (there is only ever one in every Nero, and I have NEVER managed to plonk my rear in one - it is always, always occupied. Sometimes I wonder if commuters sleep there). I realise, with an undignified blush, that what I had taken for camaraderie, is in fact an amorous approach. I am being Chatted Up. OMG. Can he not see that my black eyeliner has wept all the way down to my cheeks? That my hair could safely house several birds nests? and that my five mile walk has generously distributed rainy mud all the way to the top of my thighs? None of this seems to bother him. But I am married, very happily so, so I smile and say no, I need to continue my epic trek, and I leave. But not without an arch nod to the sort of Blitz spirit that is no doubt behind the germ of multiple Tube Strike Romances.

Tube Strike

At 9 tonight a tube strike will start. Pretty much every time there is a tube strike I debate the options - to go into work at peak time and fight my way through the sweaty mass on and off trains and buses till I get to the office, sweaty, traumatised and so stressed out I can barely think. Or, to leave it an hour or two, then head up to the station, and experience the same journey, only with around a third fewer commuters, the net difference being marginal - it's just a few less fights to get a piece of standing room with access to breathable air. Or, run through the worst possible commuter scenarios, then get to the station to find that the stalwart employees who work on the Northern line have nearly all turned out and, bar a few closed stations, and trains running every 5 minutes instead of every 3, the service is actually almost normal as long as I don't mind getting out two stops before my usual one, as my usual stop is shut, and walking an extra 15 minutes, which of course I don't, I don't mind at all - I am in fact so relieved to get on to a train on which I can sit, and am so grateful to the train driver for not striking, that I arrive in a state of smug euphoria. Or, the fourth and final option, the one I have adopted increasingly over the years, which is to mull over the first three options, and then conclude that given the pace of modern technology, I could save myself a lot of worry, stress and hyper-preparation (extra sturdy shoes/trainers, breakfast and lunch in a backpack, change of clothes if I get too sweaty commuting in, calming music, phone numbers for all the local cab companies in case I get desperate, a wad of cash to pay grasping minicab drivers who will be preying on exhausted commuters out of alternative options) and Work At Home. I take Work At Home really seriously. I am dead conscientious. I do not paint my toenails or take extra long baths or go out shopping in the morning, deluding myself that a Day Working At Home is equivalent to three days in the office.  I do, however, adopt a different rhythm. Away from multiple ad hoc requests, papers to sign off etc, reading through unread email and digesting properly long thinkpieces and articles becomes a treasured indulgence, only doable when Working At Home. And as this is pretty intense activity - hunched over the kitchen table, work mobile phone switched off, metaphorical wet towel wrapped round the head - this activity needs to be broken up. By cooking and baking. My work at home tomorrow will comprise digesting massive tomes and lots of complicated diagrams. In between I will prove and punch olive bread dough. Put together the multiple layers of a sumptuous fish pie. Create a minestrone soup.  Bake more bread. My papers will go back to work with traces of flour on them.  But my kids will come home from school out of the relentless rain and cold wind to the "Aaah, Bisto..." smell of warm bread and cookies. I will be in a state of zen, propped up by cushions, reciting  statistics easily absorbed through the fug of soup. My thumbs will have cramp from the rapid emailing of instructions on the corporate Blackberry.  In between baking and reading I will have hula hooped a million times (the cool alternative to stretching my legs, perfect activity for rubbish Uk weather) or hopped on and off the trampoline, checking the status of my budding Spring bulbs en route.  I will have updated my To Do list and this time it will be legible, unlike the scrawls I leave on multiple yellow post it notes at the desk in my office.  It will even be prioritised, with alphabetised headings (and will stay that way for no longer than 24 hours).  Yup. I loathe tube strikes, I feel deeply resentful towards strikers, I am hugely irritated at the waste of a day's travel paid for in advance on my not at all cheap annual Gold Card season ticket. But hey.  As long as a travel meltdown is in the offing, I may as well make a virtue of it.