Day 4: Baking

My Masters year at university was one of the best. I loved my course, I loved the grizzled postgraduate life, and most of all, I loved the fact that during the backs-to-the-wall period of furiously typing and re-typing my dissertation, my contact hours with tutors dropped to an average of one a week. I was expected to write ten thousand words about Robert Browning and the dramatic monologue with the least possible intervention from my tutors, and the independence and isolation suited me completely.


Immersing myself in the intricacies of Victorian poetry and Romantic aesthetics for hours at a time would on occasions leave me mentally exhausted, a condition only a healthy dose of Neighbours could cure.  More often that not, however, my thoughts would just turn desperately to distraction and the need to occupy myself with something, anything, that wasn't throwing virtual words onto a virtual page.  In short I needed an excuse to leave my desk, yet keep the creative juices flowing - and hence I discovered baking.


I've always believed that cooking is art, but baking is science. Cooking requires a reliance on subtlety and nuance, where flair and variation is encouraged.  In contract, baking demands a precision that is rarely required in all but the most gastronomic of cooking.  If a recipe says 125g of flour is required, you need electronic scales to accurately weight that amount.  For 100ml of water, you must revisit your Key Stage 3 Science and check that the meniscus of the liquid is perfectly in line with the mark of your measuring jug. It's an inherent paradox that an English and Music student thrives on such mathematical logic and scientific exaction in as trivial a pursuit as making a cake, but baking a perfect cake is to be so much more satisfying than throwing together a stir-fry.


On this particular day of freedom, I was reminiscing about those days (mainly because I return to my alma mater for a wedding this weekend) and had an urge to bake once more.  I'd recently bought my girlfriend a copy of British Baking by the geniuses at Peyton and Byrne, and within was a recipe for one of my favourite childhood obsessions, Chelsea Buns.  A quick trip to Waitrose later and I began.


At first, progress was serene. Butter was rubbed into flour, salt and sugar added, and then dried yeast with liquid carefully mixed in.  With the addition of a single egg, the dough became sticky but it came together pretty much as it should. As per the recipe I was obviously tirelessly following to the letter, I covered the sweet lump and left it to its own devices for an hour, where I would expect it to double in size.


Returning to the kitchen at the prescribed time, the dough remained resolutely its previous size.  Confused, but not perturbed, I rolled out, dotted butter in the centre, and folded in on itself, before rolling once again.  Here the problems started to occur.  If the dough had risen correctly, it would overpower the butter and welcome it into its folds, but as it was flaccid and stunted, the butter just rose to the surface on rolling, cracking the dough and spurting unattractive yellow ooze from the sides. A misguided attempt to let it rise again produced, unsurprisingly, no results. My yeast lay deadened within the dough, and no amount of coaxing, I thought, would enliven it.


There was nothing for it.  I made the sugary, curranty filling, spread out across the rolled-out disaster of dough, gritted my teeth and rolled. What resulted was a horribly misshapen, Cornish pasty-shaped splodge, fruit leaking from all sides.  The dough cast aside all attempts to seal the fruit within, mockingly splitting at every opportunity and pouring sugar all over my sideboard.  In the end, I just put it in the oven, lamenting an entire afternoon wasted.  What came out was ugly, unsightly - and perfectly, wonderfully edible...

My yeast had woken up, in the nick of time. A splodge had turned, rather euphemistically, into a loaf. It just goes to show - art can sometimes, just sometimes, triumph over science.

Day 3: South Bank

"By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can shew." - Samuel Johnson


September 2007 was the first time I travelled to London without a return ticket.  Indeed, I didn't even have a single - my Dad drove me from West Yorkshire to North London, with most of my life tucked away neatly in cardboard boxes in the boot.  I remember clearly drinking lukewarm, overly strong tea in the Welcome Break at Watford Gap, still trying to convince myself that despite having never stayed in the capital for more than a night, I was relocating permanently to this ultra-city, this gigantic monument to urbanisation, commerce and tourism. I was convinced that all business in London was conducted by suited-and-booted charlatans who carried on like candidates in The Apprentice, in a cut-throat city that would envelop me in its shadowy folds and crush me to nothing.


I had two weeks from moving into my shared flat in Holloway before I started work, and so I sought to get my bearings as best I could. I remember performing a hilariously incompetent trial commute to The City, disembarking from the 271 at Finsbury Square and traipsing backwards and forwards across the Square Mile in desperate search for my new office, finding only endless sandwich shops and identi-kit glass offices with bored receptionists and shifty security staff clock-watching to stave off the immense boredom of guarding these corporate conglomerates. But I also remember enjoying immensely an inescapable sense of anonymity that I had never found anywhere else, a sense of being one person against the vastness of an unlimited but uncaring city.  And perhaps it was an attempt to recapture that feeling that led me to walk from Waterloo to Charing Cross Road, via the South Bank, yesterday evening.


I timed my trek for early evening, yet again finding myself pushing against the flow of commuters hauling themselves down Victoria Road after ticking off another Wednesday workday. Leaving Waterloo and strolling to Jubilee Gardens, I experienced again that sense of forfeiting your identity. Already the space and the noise rendered my body insignificant, as crowds enjoying the late evening twilight sought to squeeze every last second from the attractions surrounding them. I fought my way beyond the London Eye and headed left, past the National Aquarium and the imposing facade of County Hall, and with every step I found myself distracted by the flash of cameras and smartphones solidifying the South Bank onto memory cards.  As I began to cross Westminster Bridge, gaggles of giggling schoolchildren darted in zig-zags from tourist traps to overpriced Japanese restaurants, and their sighing parents handed over banknotes to the desperate tricksters inviting you to choose under which matchbox the coin was placed.


But passing over the bridge and heading down Parliament Street and Whitehall to Trafalgar Square, I reflected on, in reality, how little different I was from these clueless tourists convinced that all of London's glory lay at the feet of a mime or a magician. I may have paid my council tax to the Greater London Authority for nearly four years, but as I've barely worked here, I found myself in that chilled grey space between tourist and native. London is both familiar and utterly intelligible to me - I might be able to tell you where the best pizza is (here) or my favourite bar for a mojito (here), but for me, living here is like staring at a pitch-black sky with faint pinpricks of light that catch the eye. I need to turn those stars into constellations, those constellations into galaxies - if that's not a noble mission for these days of freedom stretched out before me, I don't know what is.

Day 2: Portal 2

"Well done. Here are the test results: You are a horrible person. I'm serious, that's what it says: A horrible person. We weren't even testing for that. Don't let that "horrible person" thing discourage you. It's just a data point." - GLaDOS, Portal 2.

After the exertions of to-ing and fro-ing between various Zone 6 conurbations on Monday, as well as returning home later than planned after a post-Mahler gin and tonic at the Queen's Arms at Gloucester Road, an appointment with the dentist - my first in over eight years, I'm sad to admit - seemed an excellent opportunity to take the weight of my feet, albeit with a middle-aged man scraping my molars and poking my gums with an ultrasonic cleaner.

I've never had an issue with dentists, mainly because I've been lucky enough to wander through life without any major operations required. Sitting in this particular dental surgery felt weirdly like having a medical procedure performed in somebody's living room - I almost expected the tea and muffins to be produced on a silver platter after my third rinse, though no doubt the concept of muffins is frowned upon in general dentistry culture.

I left unscathed, £70 lighter and with an appointment card for a year hence. It seemed strange adding a calendar entry on GCal for July 2012, but I suppose as time rolls on and the months seem to pass ever more quickly, those beautifully blank days will soon be covered with duties and engagements. I never cease to be amazed at quite how rapidly life crystallises around you, forming unbreakable connections between you and the world at large in the blink of an eye. Even in freedom, I find that activity still permeates its way through my hours, to the extent that endeavouring to keep your calendar blank is almost as hard work as trudging through wall-to-wall appointments. Our world is one where we convince ourselves we must be ceaselessly doing, or else fall behind into primitivity. I try to challenge that world every day.

Fortunately, Day 2's appointments did indeed conclude at 9.30am, meaning I could spend the rest of the day playing Portal 2. I've never been too publicly forthcoming about my interest in gaming, as I still believe that for the vast majority of the uninitiated, the thought of video games conjures up an unpleasant vision of greasy-haired nitwits delighting in the simulated slaughter of countless numbers of soldiers, or single bearded males hunched alone over laptops, ensnared in a virtual world where they chatter with acolytes for hours but can barely hold a conversation in reality. Such stereotyping is obviously highly immature. It is now impossible to ignore the meteoric rise of gaming in ordinary households, what with the advent of motion-controls and smartphones, and with the industry generating $15.6 billion in content sales in 2010 (and that was a 'tough year') its prevalence will only increase.

There will naturally be a myriad naysayers, and those who believe that games are inextricably linked to crime, anti-social behaviour and an inability to deal with real world issues. Those naysayers should track down a copy of Portal 2 (or its equally terrific predecessor) and see for themselves how games can challenge, question and ultimately enrich a player's world. As well as its key USP of intelligent, physics-based puzzles, involving the manipulation of gels, bridges, funnels and of course the eponymous portals, the game boasts a vast but grounded environment, some terrifically anthropomorphised robots, and, crucially, a riotously funny co-operative mode where players are encouraged to interact with another to progress. And it has Stephen Merchant in it. What more could you want?

I played it for about eight hours over the course of two or three days, and found it immensely fulfilling. I enjoyed the adrenaline rush of identifying the final piece in a puzzle, of exploring the crushed world of Aperture Science, and, most of all, hearing two robots verbally sparring with a script of such intoxicating black humour it could rival any Hollywood blockbuster. Games will, I admit, never be considered as art. But for every Call of Duty and its vicious, mindless theatres of war, there is a Portal 2 to maintain the equilibrium. It's just such a shame I've finished it.

Day 1: Mahler

"The symphony is a world; it must contain everything." - Gustav Mahler

Day One started, in retrospect, with a mistake. Perhaps fired by some misplaced conviction that freedom from the distraction of work somehow imbues the body with supernatural powers, I decided, moments after waking, to go for a run - my first in around six months, maybe longer.

Running has long been an unexplained obsession of mine, perhaps because it's one of the most universal of athletic past-times. Football may personify the nation - in salubrious as well as celebratory ways - but even for a quick kick-about you need, ideally, a ball and goal posts. Running only requires legs and a destination. Of course, you can pepper the pastime with a variety of technological distractions, such as GPS watches and heart-rate monitors and iPhone apps and bottles of super-water that promise the earth, or at least five seconds off your personal best. But strip away the accoutrements and it's just you and the road, and it's your mental as well as physical strength that will keep your feet pounding.

I sorely lacked those strengths yesterday morning, and puffed from Surbiton Station to Kingston John Lewis (barely two miles) with all the grace and form of a wheezing rhino. But it was still a victory. Jogging down Victoria Road, I passed tens of commuters walking sleepily to their trains, clutching coffee cups or grunting into smartphones, and just for a few moments, running away from civilisation and onto the beautiful stretch of the Thames that separated me from my goal, I felt my rash decision vindicated ten times over.

My legs, stiff and sore this morning, have since forced me to question that decision again!

That run to Kingston was just one of three I made that day, running a number of dull but important errands. On my final trip I finally signed up for a membership to the leisure centre - my induction is Wednesday. The receptionist curtly asked me what time I wanted to present myself for gym indoctrination (or was it induction…?) and to my great surprise my mouth instantly responded "9am, Wednesday", presumably without any prior consultation with my brain. Clearly my body is conditioned to early mornings - perhaps I need to explain to it the concept of freedom.

In the evening, rushing from Kingston to South Kensington, and polishing off The End of the Affair on the journey, I met with my friend Peter, with whom I used to play in an amateurish but terrifically satisfying piano trio. We had tickets to the BBC Prom that evening, a performance of Mahler's Ninth Symphony by the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, with the wonderful Sir Roger Norrington wielding the baton. Mahler's Ninth has long been a favourite of mine, a monumental work written in a hut in the Dolomites, during a period of personal self-exile and estrangement triggered by the death of the composer's daughter and the diagnosis of a heart condition that put paid to his horrifically intense schedule of conducting and touring.

I don't intend to use this post to delve into a critical analysis of the work - innumerable writers have taken care of that for me - but in that seventy minutes of music, Mahler has distilled a powerful love of life with a submission to the inevitability of death and decay. I would urge you all to find the numerous recordings of the symphony on Spotify and experience it for yourself. The performance itself was of course amazing - maybe the tempi were a little fast for the outer, slower movements - but unfortunately the usual Prom plague of coughing, hacking, spluttering and sneezing was present and incorrect. I hate the snobbishness and presumed exclusivity of classical music as much as anybody, and the Proms do a great deal to open the borders to the masses who may have never heard a note of Mahler or Mendelssohn before, but music in all its forms requires respect and attention. Norrington conducted the beautiful Elegy by Edward Elgar as an encore to yesterday's concert, but nothing ruins a memorial to the dead more than a contrasting symphony of random throat noises emanating from the Dress Circle.

Tomorrow I visit the dentist. From the sublime to the ridiculous!

Day 0: Background

On Tuesday 21st June, at about 3.30pm, I finished a particularly arduous phone call, rose from my corner desk, and walked somewhat shakily to my manager. He barely looked up from his furious typing, swearing under his breath as the unread e-mails gushed into his inbox.

I said I needed to speak to him and that it needed to be now. Surprised by my uncharacteristic force, he led me somewhat guardedly to a pokey meeting room on the other side of the office. I remember that the phone there was disconnected, wires trailing like spaghetti across the desk, and I nearly fell over a four-way plug in my haste to take a chair.

Once sat down, I told him I resigned, that my last day would be Friday 22nd July, and that I wished him well for the future.

His reaction is for the moment irrelevant. Indeed, it doesn't even really matter what I used to do, or what I will be doing in the future. There will be plenty of time to reflect on my time there, and no doubt future posts will delve into my motivations. What does matter is that tomorrow, I won't be stumbling into the bathroom at 5.30am, throwing cold water over my face in a bid to drag myself from Sunday slumber. I won't be hastily dressing in the dark. I won't be waking my girlfriend as I struggle with cufflinks and ties and razor blades.

In fact, I have no idea what I'll be doing tomorrow. What I do know is that it will be the first day of forty-two of freedom.

It's in this blog that I intend to document those days. I've lost count of the number of people who have insisted that to spend these six weeks anywhere but in exotic climes miles away from London - cocktail in one hand, a phrasebook in the other - would be a criminal waste of an opportunity. To some extent I can see their point. But I don't have the cash to do that - I've saved a month's salary and that will be enough to ensure the rent is paid and the water still flows from my taps. Besides I've spent my entire career travelling, and sometimes the pull that home exerts over you is far greater than any promise of misadventures in South America or Eastern Europe. (Though I did Google "Buenos Aires" more than once!)

Instead, I will be rediscovering the city in which I live. I'll be practising for my Grade 8 piano exam. I'll be experimenting with recipes I've previously cast aside due to time or energy constraints. I'll be trying my utmost to re-establish some kind of personal fitness having pushed exercise to the bottom of my priority list for far too long. And I'll be sharing my exploits here.

In times of high unemployment and low national self-esteem, I want to understand the very best ways of spending time unblemished by the office. Too few are the opportunities we have to break away from the rat race and focus on doing what we want to do - what we wished we could do if we weren't manacled by the mentality of the 9-5 workday. Hopefully I'll find out more about myself in these six weeks than I ever did in the unending stream of e-mails, phone calls and cross-country trains that punctured the last four years.

(If you have any suggestions for filling my forty two days of freedom, please let me know. I'm all for the more outlandish experiences - even better if they cost less than £10!)