The Great British Bake-In

The weather is no respecter of my new found status as a semi retired man. It rained on my first day off and was unremittingly grey. I felt liberated and relaxed, even ‘though I did nothing specific to mark my new found freedoms other than a bit of shopping, some cooking and changing the sheets. Ok and some reading, movie watching, and writing I admit.

The latest instalment in the Covid story is the introduction of a graded approach to restrictions with Liverpool being the only area of the country given the grimmest Tier 3 status. For some reason I was thinking of the terrible Jimmy Osmond song of the 1970s but with Boris Johnson singing altered lyrics:

I’ll be your locked down lover from Liverpool
And you’ll do anything I say 
I am a clown, I am a puppet and an April Fool
But there simply is no other way*

The newest buzz phrase in this sorry saga is “baked in”. People were on the radio today saying that they had “baked in” hospital admissions to their forecasts and had also “baked in” the numbers of deaths to match their assumptions as if Covid were an entertainment hosted by Mary Berry or Pru Leith.

On which subject I did finish reading Sandy Toksvig’s “Between the Stops” today;  famous for co-hosting Bake Off (amongst a huge number of other things) she was born in the same year as me and we have many biographical crossovers in South London and Surrey. It’s a fascinating, easy, compelling read with a lot of very touching (and sometimes dark) moments amongst all the whimsy. A tireless campaigner for gay rights, women and minorities, she comes across as exactly the kind of famous person who would be nice to you if you said something stupid on meeting her when drunk. There are lots of funny stories in the book, my favourite one being about the eight foot high statues of nude men over the portico of Zimbabwe House on The Strand. Apparently in 1938 a solid stone penis fell off of one of them and killed a pedestrian walking along below, after which they were all emasculated for safety reasons (the statues, not the pedestrians).It really is a good read.

I saw this sign in the back of a baker’s van today and I thought it was funny. They have clearly baked in a cautious approach to their deliveries ...



* Watch the video on YouTube. If you remember it, it will make you gag. If you are too young, watch it anyway and wonder how such crap ever saw the light of day.