My husband and I have made a decision*. We are no longer going to buy Chorleywood bread if we can help it.

Why? And what is Chorleywood bread anyway? Well, that’s a picture of it up there, and apparently, 80% of our bread is made by the Chorleywood method these days. If you go and read this, you’ll probably get the answers to your questions, and if not, you can ask in the comments section. Pay attention to the recipe for Scottish Morning Rolls and in particular to the complete absence of additives and the length of the fermentation process. This is how bread used to be, and still should be, made.

Perhaps I should also add that some people think that the decline of traditional breadmaking plus the upsurge of Chorleywood bread is behind the increase in various health problems including yeast intolerance.

So, to get back to my story, when I needed to pop into our local supermarket today to pick up a few things, I went to the bakery section and started to look for traditionally baked loaves.

I found English bloomers and crusty farmhouse loaves. I found Italian, Polish and German loaves. I found ‘Mediterranean’ breads, sunflower breads, poppy-seeded breads, multi-grain, malted, and granary breads. I found a loaf of French ‘pain de campagne’ which looked and felt marginally better than all the other sponge-like loaves, but it was as light as air and I didn’t think a French countryman would have recognised it.

I picked it up, somewhat disconsolately .. and then I saw a baker lurking behind the shelves so I accosted him.

Me: ‘Excuse me … ?’

Baker: ‘Yes, can I help you?’

Me: ‘Thank you, yes. Do you have any traditionally baked, long fermentation loaves?’

Baker: ‘Huh?’

Me: ‘Do you have any traditionally baked bread, with a long fermentation?’

Baker: ‘Fermentation … I don’t recognise that word. What do you mean?’

Me: ‘You know, you have to leave the dough to rise, to let the yeast work?’

‘Baker’: ‘Oh, ah, yes. Mm. No. But we’re going to start doing that next week!’

Me: ‘Oh good. Something to look forward to, then!’

‘Baker’: ‘Yes – it’ll be good. We’re going to let the dough rise for two hours, then .. ‘

Me: ‘Two hours?? Oh, I was thinking longer. I’ve been buying loaves with an eight, or even twelve hour fermentation.’

‘Baker’: ‘Oh yeah, they used to do that, didn’t they? Leave it in a box with straw in it overnight, then knock it back the next morning.’**

Me (deciding I was onto a loser with this one): ‘Um. Yeah. OK, thanks!’

I wish I could have shown him this -

Now, many of you simply may not care about the sea-change in our bread production methods. Indeed, some of you may actively prefer the Chorleywood variety with all of its dubious additives, but really, what have we come to when every single one of the 500 types of bread in a supermarket are made this way and there is simply no alternative?

The saddest thing is that we discovered a little village baker, not too far from our house, located in a little roadside terraced house with a traditional shop front and a rack of wooden shelves for the bread and a display of home-made cakes under the counter. I thought I’d try some of their sourdough bread, but I wish I hadn’t. It was clearly made using the Chorleywood Bread Process. Listen, guys and gals; sourdough bread should not be as light and fluffy as a 70s hairdo. It should be fairly solid and dry! I can only assume that it contained a small amount of sourdough starter, just for the taste, but a traditional sourdough loaf it was not.

Now, I know that in countries where food is more a way of life than a method of getting the necessary fuel into one’s body they are very scornful of English bread compared to their own. What do you think?

Do you like bread that is light, airy, and ultrasoft? Or do you like to get your teeth into a slice of the real deal; bread which is satisfying to eat, if a little more like hard work to chew?

* Yes, normally I would say ‘OH and I’, but I thought this made me sound more like the Queen.

** Probably. Back in the Dark Ages. Perhaps it is still done this way somewhere, but I can’t help thinking he may be just a tad muddled on this one.

Well, I blame the drugs anyway.

Since I’ve been taking tablets for my high blood pressure, I’ve been experiencing tinnitus to some extent, and when the doc put me on new ones, it got very much worse. There were other, more serious, side effects too, and in the end another doctor in the group practice took me off them, much to my relief. However, the tinnitus seems to be permanent, sadly, and may in fact be made worse by one (or more) of the other six thousand drugs I have to take these days. Perhaps the Omeprazole, taken for acid reflux … and you will know, if you’ve ever had this hideous thing, that a little tinnitus, dizziness and blurred vision is a small price to pay to escape the quite horrendous ‘HELP ME I’M HAVING A HEART ATTACK!!’ type of pain that it can cause.

Of course, it might be the diuretic I have to take – also for my blood pressure. But I do need to keep this under control or I’ll probably die of a stroke or aneurism or something like 80% of my ancestors seem to have done. Anyway, it seems that myxoedema, yet another of my not-very-interesting disorders, can also cause tinnitus because of water retention, which can affect the ears. So, the diuretics can both create and solve tinnitus depending on the cause. How very Catch 22.

But all this depressing cogitation on the subject of medical problems, drugs and side-effects is not without humour.

You see, because of the tinnitus, I now sometimes have a little difficulty hearing speech when there is other noise going on. So last night when I was listening to Italian radio on my laptop while playing online Scrabble* and OH began singing, I was distracted. I stopped playing Scrabble and OH’s pleasant baritone took over.

OH (singing): ‘Oh, a wimaway, a wimaway, a wimaway, a wimaway .. the lion sleeps tonight! In the jungle, the … something … jungle ..’

Me: ”Wimaway’ .. What is ‘wimaway’? What does that mean, anyway?

OH: ‘I dunno. I’m (starts to run water into the kettle) munching the gargles of youth!’

Me: ‘AHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!’

OH: ‘What??’

Me: ‘Munching the gargles of youth!!’

OH: ‘?’

Me: ‘That’s what you said: ‘munching the gargles of youth!’

OH: ‘No I didn’t!!’

Me: ‘What did you say, then?’

OH (sternly): ‘I said ‘I’m as much in the dark as you are”

Oh.

Now, it has to be said that OH has his own little difficulties with his prescription drugs, which cause much hilarity due to a touch of aphasia at times plus some really interesting hallucinations … but that’s another story, and on this occasion, I believed him. It was my ears, and I’m officially going ga-ga.

As they say, if you didn’t laugh, you’d cry.

Or maybe it was ‘in few dinner crafts, unicorn’?

Yes, yes, I’m sure that was it.

Maybe.

Oh, to hell with it.

* And how’s that for multi-tasking?

OH was in the supermarket today, picking up a few things for me while I was visiting the hospital with Sid.

He finished collecting the things we needed, took his basket to the checkout and began loading them onto the belt. Suddenly, the young checkout girl rang her buzzer, and after a couple of minutes along came a supervisor in answer to the call. The girl turned to her superior and said in a low, but still audible voice:

‘I really need to use the loo. Could you get someone to take over?’

The supervisor nodded and walked away, and the shopping continued along the belt. The checkout girl rang it up, and OH bagged it and got out his credit card and popped it into the machine.

While he was waiting for the total to appear on the screen, a second woman appeared.

Woman to Checkout Girl: ‘I hear you need someone to take over for a few minutes?’

Checkout Girl (Quietly): ‘It doesn’t matter now!‘

OH completed the transaction and quietly left. He really, really didn’t want to know the reason for her change of heart!

Well, it surprised me! Not sure about the dogs…

I was taking the little doggies for their evening walk yesterday, and it was dark. I dunno about where you live, but here we have those horrible sodium lights which just seem to turn everything a sickly yellow-brown colour without actually shedding much in the way of actual light, so it was pretty gloomy.

Anyway.

There I was walking the dogs, and – since the outing was for their benefit – letting them sniff at this and that and pee up things* and all, and there is this one hedge where they nearly always spend a few minutes reading the pee-mail. I expect it serves as the local doggy newsagent, or something. And then it dawned on me that I’d been standing there for quite a few minutes, and the dogs still had their noses in the hedge, so I took a step towards them and …

‘MRRAAAOOOOOWWW!!!’

Well. It made ME jump! Not so the dogs, who still had their noses stuck in the hedge closely observing (as it turned out) a cat. A very vocal cat. A cat who was tired of being observed by two very large and curious dogs and was issuing a serious threat in Classical Feline.

Clearly the dogs don’t speak the lingo, so it was up to me to interpret.

‘Come on chaps’, I said, gently pulling on the leads. ‘Unless you want to get your eyes scratched out’.

And they came instantly. Suspiciously fast. Almost as if – dare I say – they were just waiting for a reason to leave without unseemly and undignified haste.

‘I was just ‘splaining to Ranger …’ said Sid, hopping rapidly up the road behind me, and not looking back.

‘Yes, but what IS it?’ demanded Ranger. ‘Looked quite int’resting to me. Smelled funny though .. ‘

‘Trust me, you don’t want it’ I told him, firmly. ‘They bite and they scratch’.

‘OK’, Ranger said, tucking himself between me and Sid. ‘Anyway, you know I don’t like fluffy toys. Especially if they have sharp bits!’

Tonight we walked by that same hedge again. I half-expected them both to pull over towards it to see if the cat was still there, but no. They studiously ignored it and passed without a glance.

But I did find the cat stuffie Ranger was given for Christmas later, tossed out of his bed with half its tail missing.

I blame Sid. Remember the octopus?

* Not people’s cars, or flower beds, or rubbish bins, obviously. People can show a deplorable lack of understanding about such things.