Style notes from a plague house
As we came to the end of a fifth consecutive week of illness in our home last week, I decided I’d take this week off baking to reflect upon my business and plan for the future. After all, the children had already contracted and recovered from the whole Bingo card of childhood illnesses this term, so I’d have an empty house and a clear head. Exciting!
Well that was the idea until my son came downstairs on Monday morning with scarlet fever all over his lovely cheeks, firing the starting pistol for Week 6 of These Four Walls.
Until Monday, myself and Steve had already managed 5 weeks of juggling work and our children tag-teaming chest infections, fevers, and scarlet fever (the other child), but those flushed cheeks were the final tipping point. Another school absence form. Put the kettle on.
I’ll see this as an opportunity! I thought. I wrote a list of things I could achieve this week whilst nursing, without baking and delivering 100 loaves. There were 36 things on the list. 36 things is easier than 100 loaves!
At the time of you reading this, I have crossed off 4 of them, and baked 0 loaves. It’s weeks like this that I am impressed I manage to run a business at all! How does anyone do anything? I can’t remember.
I bought the Sunday Times at the weekend. I usually just read Mum’s when she’s finished with it, but this week I was actually IN IT.
In a feature about why Sevenoaks is a great place to live, my bakery was named as one of the reasons. This was a pretty cool surprise.
Right at this moment, I feel less one-woman powerhouse, and more one-woman plague house, but YES I’ll take that new name thank you very much! I am delighted about this recognition, and am so happy with all the new local connections that have sprung up in my inbox.
One of the things I have treated myself to this week, whilst baking no bread, and completing no tasks (but hopefully being good company to my lovely boy), has been to read the ST Style section in the week it was actually published, and not saved from my Mum’s recycling bin three weeks later.
It will not be obvious to you from looking at my own personal styling, but I have pored over this mag every week since I was a teenager, from the days of Tara P-T and Liz Jones through to Dolly Alderton.
I have always particularly enjoyed The Barometer. So in homage to the only reading I have achieved this week, here is my own Barometer to influence your weekend lifestyle choices.
Style Barometer of a Plague House
GOING UP
Penicillin
There’s some overlap with my homelife and this week’s ST Style section on this one.
Scarlet Fever is IN. But for me, it’s the little bottles of red medicine in my fridge that I am celebrating. When children had scarlet fever in the past, parents had to BURN THEIR TEDDIES. The thought of this makes my stomach shrink with horror. My daughter’s teddies are ALIVE. They have personalities. Thank you Alexander Fleming, thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Crumpets Pikelets Pancakes
Here’s a great example of instagram vs reality. Not that I posted this sorry scene on instagram, but it made me laugh that the same cooking experience could be represented in two totally different ways.
To cheer ourselves up, my son and I decided to make crumpets. How wholesome! We didn’t bother to read the recipe properly - ha! How important can it be? - and made these bleak batter corpses.
Then I remembered ordering hot buttered pikelets in Bettys once, and wondered if we could retrieve the situation by abandoning the crumpet rings? Yes! We are wholesome again.
The verdict though? Too much faff, and pancakes are much nicer.
Television
God Bless our Television. When I was poorly at primary school, children’s TV programmes didn’t start until school had finished, so there were many blank hours to fill. The most entertainment I got was Mum getting a box of my old Beanos out of the cupboard so I could re-read them.
At secondary, the situation was a hundred times bleaker. As a weekly boarder, if I was disorganised enough to be poorly on a week day, I’d be sent to Sick Bay. I have much to say about Sick Bay, and will save this for another time, but there were up to five invalids in there at a time, in one room, with a tiny television - the size of two shoeboxes - in the far right hand corner of the room on a cupboard.
So, on top of whatever ailment you’d gone in there with, you could add Painful Neck Crick as an additional medical complication as you strained to watch Countdown.
But now - praise be! You can watch anything you want, at any time. My daughter has interpreted this as having the liberty to sit under her duvet and watch every single episode of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power.
I have just researched this, and discovered there are 52 episodes. 24 minutes per episode. Gosh, that adds up doesn’t it. That is - dear lord - 20 hours of - researches again - ‘violence, injury detail, threat’.
Still - it’s a better childhood memory for her than a sore neck and Richard Whiteley.
Against this context, my friend texted me this week with concerns that her 2 year old may be watching too much Postman Pat, at an hour a day.
My friend, you are asking the wrong person.
GOING DOWN
Victoria Beckham satin kajal eyeliner
To boost morale I finally bought myself a VB satin kajal eyeliner (cinnamon). Longer-term readers may know this has been on my radar for some time due to Victoria’s aggressive algorithm.
Your eyes are dark, my son said.
This was said in the same way as when someone says, You’ve had a haircut!
when what they really mean is
You’ve had a haircut, and it’s a bad haircut, but I want you to know that I am a nice person who doesn’t want you to feel uncomfortable in my presence just because your hair looks shit
Thanks a lot, I said.
You look like a zombie, he added
My daughter, sensing that this might need softening, quickly elaborated:
A zombie that’s going to the movies!
So thanks for that Victoria. I would add, with some irritation, that it actually is a lovely product, and it does glide on beautifully, but clearly you need to adopt a lighter touch when sporting eyeliner around convalescing children.
Staying In
Grab your wallet and keys and get OUT. And - ignore the detractors - apply liberal eyeliner! Even Florence Nightingale must have needed the occasional pub quiz to take her mind off things. This week I went out. In London! Food, theatre, chats, laughs. I recommend it, style hunters!
Ideally go with my friend Kate, who you may not be fortunate enough to know of course, but is just the person to lift you out of your plague house and into the beating heart of our country’s capital.
Honestly it was as thrilling to me as the time Kate and I hit Chessington in ‘94.
Business planning
This has not happened, not even slightly. But I did go to the bottle bank, and I have been meaning to do that for ages.