Have we turned into a nation of bakers?

Or is there someone stockpiling spelt flour?

The queue starts forming at about 9 am every Saturday morning. Mums, dads, old and young. By 10 am it’s down the street and around the corner. They’re all waiting to buy posh bread and cakes from my local bakery, Hart & Lova. Since lockdown, they only open twice a week, a Wednesday and a Saturday. By noon, everything is gone.

Having a piece of carrot cake as a lunch substitute used to be a regular thing for Bob and me every weekend until lockdown. Since then, in an effort to avoid the queue, I’ve taken to baking. Carrot cake, lemon drizzle cake, American crumb cake. I suspect I’m not alone if the empty shelves in the supermarket, usually reserved for flour and sugar, are anything to go by.

On Saturday I went to Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett, Tesco, Peppercorns - a specialist provider of organic/healthy/over-priced items to buy and still came back empty-handed. I just don’t get the point of queueing at a two-metre distance when, once inside the shop, it’s much the same as always. If two people are buying soft cheese at once, then clearly you’re going to be in the same space at the same time.

Once I exhausted my search, I googled how to make self-raising flour out of wholemeal flour, then mixed it with some other self-raising flour that had expired two years earlier, added the other ingredients that I’d managed to acquire and poured it into a loaf tin. An hour later I had produced something that, while tasting of carrot cake, only vaguely resembled it. It was good enough. Bob didn’t complain about it which is the main thing, right?

Singing for my supper

Amongst the many ways I make what some people call a living, singing is (or was) one of them. After about 18 months of performing with my pianist/accompanist George, we were starting to pick up regular work and had a residency lined up in a pub in Clerkenwell from April. We made a couple of video showreels with the view to sending them out and seeing if we could find ourselves an agent. I was researching and putting together a show based on the life, times and music of Andy Razaf, who worked with Fats Waller from the 1920s-40s and wrote Ain’t Misbehavin, Honeysuckle Rose, as well as another 800 or so songs.

I love digging into another period of history, just as crazy as the one we’re living through. Prohibition, gangsters, a tumultuous political climate chock full of colourful characters that swung from the hard left to the hard right … the early part of the twentieth century had it all complete with the Great Depression. Who said history doesn’t repeat itself?

I have a friend. Let’s call him Dermot, who has suggested for the past five or so years, that I turn the camera on my day-to-day life as if anyone would find that of interest. Despite my love of performing, I’ve never been keen on the idea. It felt too narcissistic, vacuous, and without much merit aside from appealing to the half dozen or so men scattered around the globe with an unhealthy fetish for New York, Jewish, middle-aged women.

More recently, he has suggested that I record the songs I’ve been learning and share them via Facebook Live. This made more sense to me as a way to get a few more followers and practise. Recording without an audience, into a computer, turned out to be much harder than I expected and so far I’ve been disappointed with the results.

As I’ve said previously, I’m usually quite happy being mediocre but not s***. Singing along with a piano is not the same thing as singing along to a backing track. Googling how to fix the problem, I purchased an expensive recorder to plug into my computer, only to discover that I needed a small mixer as well. I’m currently reading 100-page instruction manuals on how to mix when all I want is not to sound so crap. I shall come out of lockdown with a further string to my bow - sound engineer - and bits of kit that I never knew I needed or even wanted.

News flash: I managed to secure a small amount of Arts Council funding to enable George to create the backing tracks I need to be able to learn more Andy Razaf tunes. The show will go on, one way or another.

Shows to avoid during a pandemic

Amongst the many programmes I missed when they first came on air, Chernobyl was one that was on my must-watch-at-some-time-in-the-future list. When it comes to guilty pleasures, I’m more of a Marvel superhero TV series kind of gal, my partner is a cops and robbers type of guy. Chernobyl didn’t really fit into either category and so we agreed that we’d take out a NowTV subscription on a 7-day trial and blast through it during that time.

What a big fat mistake that was.

What was I thinking of when deciding to watch a historical drama about an invisible killer (radiation) sweeping through a town? Yes, it’s unbelievably good TV and definitely one of those shows that you should watch if you haven’t already, just not during a pandemic. Just saying.

Stuff you really wish would happen anytime but now

When I saw the text from my bank asking if I’d recently used my one and only debit card (I got rid of credit cards years ago after realising they were poison) to top up an EE and O2 PAYG phones when I knew I hadn’t, I really hoped it was a message from some random criminal phishing for my passcode.

Sadly, it wasn’t and now I’m card-less, meaning that every online transaction, which is every transaction, is bouncing.

Stuff I’m watching this week

Grayson Perry’s Art Club on Channel 4. Very entertaining. You can watch on catch-up on All4.

Normal People. Based on Sally Rooney’s bestseller, it’s full of gorgeous Irish scenery and good looking young people, exploring intimacy for the first time. It’s everything my youth wasn’t, which makes it a somewhat masochistic exercise while viewing.

YouTube videos on unboxing the Musical Mini Mixer. Terribly dull.

Rewatching Frankenstein NT Live’s production with Benedict Cumberbatch. FABULOUS, darling.

Keep well and stay safe,

Suzanne