Seasonal confectionary news

If you're the sort of person who is not excited by sticking breakfast cereals together with chocolate and putting Mini-Eggs in the middle to make incredibly lifelike yet delicious bird's nests, then good luck with hauling yourself out of bed every day for the rest of your life.

These were crafted by Miss W for lunch yesterday. You can see that, with commendable attention to detail, she has chosen to use Shredded Wheat for twig veritas.

The nests have been 'styled', as we say in magazines, with chicks I found in one of Lewisham's finest pound shops. And in magazine terms, the lady chicks are luring the Red reader, with their cosy-retro Cath Kidston-style headscarves, while the male chicks are more cutting-edge cool-mag. In fact, they look like they're in some avian Hot Chip tribute band. Also, nice bow ties. And we all know how cool they are at the moment…

Now then, it's been a while since I had a proper, delicious, borderline-downmarket Easter Egg – obviously it's been Green & Black's or nothing since I hit my 30s – but are they all like this now?

How long has the stuff that's not the egg been packaged outside the egg? Where is the element of surprise? What happened to the crashing Easter-morning melancholy of bashing open the chocolate egg to discover a disappointingly small amount of chocolatey things indeed, relative to the size of the cavity? Is nothing sacred?

With great power comes great responsibility

About a year before he died, my dad – the king of the fad and the fixation, the passion and the preoccupation – decided he would learn to cook. He was roughly 60, giddy with the liberty of early retirement and hungry for the new – or perhaps just hungry. Prior to this resolution, he was like many men of his generation – my mum could not leave the homestead for a few days without a significant investment in Vesta meals and malt loaf to ensure he would actually eat something while she was away.

And so it began. He bought knives and cookery books. He rolled up his sleeves. And for a few months, he rarely arrived at my house without some homemade offering – a batch of oatcakes, a bowl of exotic fruit salad with anxiously simmered syrup, selotaped shut to prevent a slow, sticky seep all the way from Norfolk to South London. That's how I remember it, at least. Maybe this only happened once or twice, but they're my memories and I'll misshape them how I like.

One of the last presents I bought him – and I don't remember if it was the last Christmas or the last birthday – was a kitchen blowtorch. It was the perfect marriage of man and miniature machine – flash, nifty, yet with a considerable capacity for foolhardy calamity. In my childhood, my dad memorably a) fell backwards through the glass of our living room window while trying to secure a rope on his hand-built boat which lived on our driveway, and b) almost perished under the weight of our car when he was working underneath it and the puny power of a sub-standard jack was dramatically exposed.

After he died – and incredibly, in the run-up to this event, he had managed not to set fire to his own eyebrows – my mum gave the blowtorch to me and I buried it deep in one of my kitchen cupboards, where it has been in the intervening four and a half years.

Until today. Today, with an appropriateness that is as pleasing as it is coincidental, the culinary blowtorch was resurrected. I made a Simnel Cake, according to the gospel of Nigella Lawson, to take to Miss W and Marbury's for Easter lunch. I handrolled the 11 tiny marzipan balls that go on top – as you will know, they traditionally represent the apostles (soz, Judas – you're barred). Mine are of slightly uneven size and randomly spaced which, of course, is of considerable, if indeterminate, religious significance.

'Now for the bit I love,' says Nigella, introducing the notion of artfully scorching the marzipan topping, 'but you can ignore altogether.'

What are you saying, Lawson? That I am not up to a bit of live-action charring? Who do you think you're dealing with? I have won over £3.75 in high-level baking competitions. Step back, cow eyes*, while I open the throttle and hit the ignition.

(You may guess from this that I am not a driver.)

Just so you know, blowtorching is AMAZING. I have rarely felt more alive. I may have found my inner superhero. She has a blowtorch coming out of the end of each limb and she is called The Caramelizer.

All back to my place for crème brûlée?

*I don't mean this. I love Nigella. I'm just showing off.

Customer service

It is Saturday evening. I am in Marks & Spencer at Victoria station. I am weary. It has been a wearying week. I am buying approximately £7.50 worth of slightly overpriced but reassuringly high-quality groceries. The cashier scans the contents of my basket.

'That'll be £500 please,' he says, delighted with himself.

'Wow,' I say. 'That is so reasonable.'

We have a little bit of a laugh together, and I pay the £7.50 and get on the 185 bus home.

It is Sunday morning. I am at the Bagel Factory concession in Paddington station. I am weary. It has been a wearying week. I am buying approximately £2 worth of barely toasted bagel and honey. The cashier punches some buttons on the till with his rubbery-gloved fingers.

'That'll be £150 please,' he says, delighted with himself.

'Wow,' I say. 'Is that all?'

We have a little bit of a laugh together, and I pay the £2 and get on a train to Oxford, imagining the memo that went out to all service employees of mainline train stations.

'Your customers are busy working professionals. They may be tired, worried, or just really really hungry. Brighten their day. Create a rapport. Try a joke. Share a moment together. People will come back for more.'

But are staff at Paddington stealing jokes from staff at Victoria? Is there a bitter dispute about whether Caffe Nero at Kings Cross or Monsoon at Waterloo have bagged the exclusive rights to use 'My assistant manager's got no nose...' Will the staff at WH Smith at Euston be taking it in turns to wear a false nose and glasses?

This may only be the start of it.

'Gym? Your name is gym?'*

It's true that I don't much like gyms at the best of times – they smell funny and they play terrible music – but you can't tell me this isn't a little bit sinister:


I'm not sure if it's the steps descending into tomb-like oblivion, or how gothic the logo's typographical flourishes seem when rendered in white on black. Whichever, it smacks of infernal nightmares.

What happens inside? Are people being sacrificed on toning tables? (My use of the expression 'toning tables' is indicative of the last time I was in a gym.) Are people doing their combat training bare knuckle? Against snarling yellowed-eyed hounds? Are lost souls wailing and crying and tearing at their own skin because there's no fluffy towels left and they're having to use their own scratchy ones from home?

The sun was shining, but my blood was chilled as I went on my way.

* You win a prize† if you can identify this film quotation. It utilises a pun on gym/Jim**.
† You do not win a prize.
** I may not be quoting it entirely accurately.
Good luck!

'Rock and roll is here to stay...'

I love the way Alex Chilton sings, 'I've been trying hard against unbelievable odds.'



I'm sad that he won't be singing any more.

Also, this…

Not a big visual element to this post. Maybe you could look out of the window for a bit or take one of your stamp albums down off the shelf and flick through it, remembering all you achieved in assembling your collection. Be proud. Be nostalgic.

Salad days

If you are in the market for a salad spinner, and you're on a budget, I can help you. There was one abandoned on my street this week. I saw it on my way to choir practice. I cannot guarantee that it had not been used as a latrine by passing wildlife – canine, volpine, humine. Any port in a storm.

Not that one ever seems to actively acquire a salad spinner. Has anyone ever bought one? They just seem to find themselves in your kitchen, stoutly defending their corner of a cupboard, all sturdy plastic and 70s colour scheme. An incongruous out-of-timer in an era of pre-packed salad and all its easy charms. A beige alien.

When I was little, a popular strand of storytelling by and for the young involved extraordinary, implausible, unresolvable adventure, culminating in the 'all a dream' get-out. Ninety-nine point seven per cent of the stories I wrote ended like this, fifty-two point seven per cent of the ones I read.

But eventually I learnt what I considered to be a highly sophisticated modulation. When the dreamer awoke to find themselves back in their own world, they would also find some kind of souvenir from the alternate reality they had slumbered themselves into. It wasn't a dream at all! Or was it? Or wasn't it? Or was it?

How could you deny your presence in another dimension, when right in front of your very eyes was an exotic shell, a pair of gloves, a quill, a salad spinner? How else could it have got there?

This is the advert

Can somebody cooler than me – and here you must suspend your disbelief, for I'm telling you that these people really do exist – explain the concept behind this season's French Connection adverts?

If you haven't seen them, they focus on a man, who is called 'the man', and a woman, who is called 'the woman', and they feature a series of pictures and some artfully emotionless slogans.

'The woman' is chic, gamine and just the right amount of hunted cartoon woodland animal.

'No, hunters, don't shoot me! While it will enable my son to experience a character-defining rite of passage, it will traumatise thousands of young cinema-goers all over the world.'

The man, meanwhile, is brooding and bearded in a way that goes beyond the type who might be sexily taciturn and build you some furniture out of reclaimed wood, and out the other side into Tom Hanks in Cast Away.

And I speak as someone who LOVES Tom Hanks. He collects typewriters. What is not to love?

I feel that perhaps French Connection are channelling some masterpiece of French cinema that I have never seen. I think I mostly think this because a number of the slogans sound like they are written by someone doing a bad impression of Jean-Paul Gaultier. Who is French.

But wait – some are written like Peter & Jane Go To The Advertising Agency.

What is in the model's bag? A cake. The model likes cake. She does not eat cake. 'I eat cake,' says Peter. 'I eat cake but then feel wracked with guilt and self-loathing afterwards,' says Jane.

Never mind, Peter and Jane, today we will be learning about questions.

Reassuringly, though, some of the adverts do incorporate a modern staple of style speak – what I call the diminished fashion plural.

The shoulder is very special.

I'm wearing a daytime sequin.

I'm teaming this trouser with a heel.

With my generously-proportioned lower body, I simply can't do a skinny jean.

And so on.

But while the shoulder may be special this season, good shoulder health is apparently OUT for spring/summer 10. Look at this:

This is how she stands, is it? Well, edgy fashion stylists, how she stands will one day culminate in this beautiful young lady – who admittedly needs to get that hair out of her eyes because you can't see that pretty face – becoming the kind of pensioner who cannot elevate her upper body higher than 90 degrees to the pavement.

Fashion stylists seem hell-bent on jamming models into this kind of pose. But why? Because they are wreaking some kind of bitter, jealous vengeance on those extraordinary, elegant, elongated young bodies? Because it's cool?

Hear this, stylists. Bad posture = not cool.

I have yet to see a hunchback in Dazed & Confused magazine.

I have yet to read Dazed & Confused magazine, if I'm absolutely honest.

Here's another pouting uber-slouch:

French Connections's summer must-have? The bright floral shift-dress. Mine? Lower lumber support.

The final advert that I have hamfistedly scanned reflects my own reaction to the campaign…