On baking bread

Imagine your June 2020 self travels back in time a few months to meet your March 2020 self. June passes March a jar of sour-dough starter.

'Here, you'll find this useful,' says June.

March stares at it in bewilderment. 'Why?'

'Trust me,' says June. 'Oh, and here's a recipe for banana bread. You're gonna need that, too.'

During this pandemic, it feels like everyone's been baking bread.

We began the lockdown with a tried and trusted recipe for soda bread - my husband's Irish and developed a good recipe years ago. It's delicious when fresh, especially with cream cheese and smoked salmon (if we happen to have those in the house). We love it toasted too. His recipe uses buttermilk, a mixture of flours - plain white, wholemeal and malted - and he adds pumpkin seeds and linseeds to it.

We also have a breadmaker we've used on and off in bursts of enthusiasm over the years. With both grown-up sons staying with us for the duration, we realised we'd need a lot of bread, so why not dust it off and use it? Favourite recipe is based on a French bread recipe from the instruction booklet, but uses a mix of flour including malted flour.

If I were more organised and was writing this post in advance, this would be a photo of bread we've made at home. But the post is being put together at the last minute, so the photo is from BBC Good Food and is a loaf made by Paul Hollywood.

Back in late March and early April, there was a Great Flour Shortage across the UK. With everyone baking, the flour mills, while they were producing enough, weren't able to quickly switch from packing it in large sacks for commercial use to the 1.5kg bags sold in supermarkets. We especially struggled to find our favourite malted flour and in desperation my husband eventually ordered a large quantity of it online.

Yeast too was a problem. Its street value rose to more than that of cocaine at one time. I posted a lament on Facebook about our lack of it and ended up with two friends posting me some and another local friend telling me that a nearby deli stocked it. (This deli was also selling flour bought by the sack and repackaged into small paper carrier bags to sell to the public. Life-saver!)

And then there was the sour-dough. I need to make a confession here - it is not me who makes any of these breads. In fact I've never made a loaf in my life. My husband and I don't follow a traditional split of pink jobs versus blue jobs - he does the food shopping and most of the cooking; while I mow the lawn and put the bins out. So I am writing here from a point of view of near-ignorance in all things baking-related.

In the absence of a time-travelling June self visiting us in March, we did not have a sour-dough starter, so my husband watched Youtube videos to discover how to make his own. Apparently you only need flour and water, though he did invest in some special jars.

For weeks now, my husband's alternated between using the breadmaker, making soda bread and making sour-dough. The breadmaker just requires you to chuck in the ingredients and press a button: three hours later it's done. Soda bread is quick too - turn oven on to preheat, mix ingredients, whack the dough on a baking tray, slash the top 'to let the fairies out' and bake. But the sour-dough takes all day. Mix, knead, prove, stretch, fold - God knows; I keep well away from it all! Tastes good, though.

This is a writing blog and I've been talking in a rather uninformed way about bread-making. So I'll round off with a (slightly tortured) analogy to bring it back to writing. Making sour-dough bread is like writing a novel. You need a starter - an idea. You can't use that immediately - it needs to ferment for a while, and you must gather other ingredients. You need to mix it all up, creating the dough - writing the first draft. It must prove for a while - put the novel aside before you attempt to edit it. You'll need to stretch, fold and reshape it. Eventually you must commit: put the dough in the oven; send the novel to your publisher. The baking process is the publisher giving the book a cover and blurb, turning it into something enticing that people will want to read/want to eat. And then you just hope that all your hard work pays off and people will enjoy your finished product!

Getting through lockdown

I knew it was my turn to post on the blog this week, but I've been putting off writing anything. I've struggled this week with everything, to be honest. My uncle died on Tuesday, and this week should have been the start of a new adventure in France, and I've found it hard to get on with anything. So with only a few hours to spare before my blog post should go up, I've just written a kind of brain dump on life during lockdown.

Really, is a writer's life in lockdown very different from normal? I know many writers who are by nature hermits. They live alone, they sit in their home offices to write, they order shopping online and have it delivered, they conduct friendships online via social media, they venture out only infrequently to meet family. They panic when they need to meet up with editors or agents and spend days wondering what to wear and how to manage the journey. They're happier in the company of their imaginary characters than in the company of flesh and blood friends.

And yet - it is different. Knowing you can't go out for a coffee with a friend. You can't decide to invite family for Sunday lunch. There's no chance of a lunch out with your editor. And although cancellation of a writers' conference means less expense and less stressing about how you'd get there - you were looking forward to it so much and now it's been crossed out of your diary, along with everything else.

And there's pressure on you that comes with the knowledge there's not much else to do other than write, so surely you should be writing double your usual output, working on more than one project, getting yourself well ahead of deadlines. Yet you don't feel like writing, you can't concentrate, you spend hours on social media or checking the news - what's the latest death toll, what mad solution has Trump advised now, has Johnson been spotted anywhere yet? When you finally force yourself away from the computer or phone, all you want to do is curl up with an escapist book, watch popcorn TV or lose yourself in a meaningless jigsaw puzzle.

'If you don't emerge from the lockdown with a new skill, you never lacked time, you lacked motivation," say dozens of memes shared across Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. You then feel guilty because there are friends posting that they've spring-cleaned their house, completed the couch to 5km programme, learned French, baked cakes and made bread, or worst of all - written 3000 words a day on their latest novel. And all you've done is fritter away the day.

But then there are the tweets that say if you have simply made it through the day you have succeeded, because frankly that's all many of us are required to do right now. Sometimes we'll have good days when we feel on top of things and can accomplish something (even if it is just putting a load of washing on) and other days when we can't. And that's all right. Just as when you've lost a loved one and are learning to live alongside that fact, it's OK to give yourself permission to simply grieve. We're all grieving in a way, for the life we had and the opportunities we've lost. And too many are grieving for loved ones who've died. No one tells a recently-bereaved person to buck up and get on with writing a novel or learning a language. We shouldn't tell each other this either, during the current crisis.

It's like surfing, my husband used to tell me some years ago when I was dealing with my mother's illness and death. The waves keep on coming, and some of them will knock you off the surfboard, but the trick is to get back on as soon as you can, and learn to surf those waves rather than stay submerged underwater. I've been under a lot this week, but I know I'll get back on the board soon and the waves will carry me forward rather than threatening to drown me. Until then, it's OK to simply tread water for a bit.