Ra Breidheid!

Friday 9:36 p.m.
A man (the fourth one!) finally fixed our cooker on Wednesday. The oven has been out of action for nearly two months and this is the longest time I can remember going without home made bread for about thirty years.

Even when I was in Australia during the eyeball bulging hot days, I still made my own bread.

This didn't start as some quaint hippy notion like spinning your own wool or something like that ... I started making bread when I was 26 years old because I was on the dole. Make bread, thinks I. It must be cheap. It's called the staff of life by someone so it's probably good for you as well, or at least could help you live on ...the ... breadline.

The Roman army marched on bread.

Water, teaspoon of salt, dried yeast, touch of sugar, wholemeal. Nothing else.

There should be German rules about bread. They have them for beer. This is the best law ever. There's only about five things you can put in kraut beer. Erdinger, a weissbier, has as ingredients: water, wheatmalt, barleymalt, hops, yeast. I'm on my second one at the moment and can heartily vouch for this product.

In the paper today there was a story about some unfortunate swans. They've got the swan equivalent of ricketts, which was a disease of malnourishment prevalent in the slums of Chilly Jockoland in the 1920s and 30s. The guardians of the swans have asked the humans to stop feeding the swans white bread and to switch to brown bread since there is no nourishment in the white bread, or not much.

The white bread is like candy floss. I used to love it. Once it was regarded as much better, kind of posh. Refined. Anyway, it's rubbish. Brown bread as you buy it in the shops is also rubbish. Anyone who has ever made bread might have a problem even thinking of these things as being bread.

You can buy a loaf of bread like mine around these parts for just under three quid. What? You can buy a loaf of "brown" bread for just over a quid, but god knows what they'd done to that, and they will go to hell for it, or something bad will happen to their ovens in another lifetime, but it's just not right. There's something unpleasant underlying all this. I think it's capitalism, or consumerism, or packaging, or ... I know food has to be cheap, but the bread product on display could do with having some food in it.

For if you bake bread with indifference, you bake bread that feeds but half man's hunger. Kahil Gibran. The Wall.

Half ten on Saturday night! I'm starting to feel good. I'm doing this with my arms folded. Fabulous trick. I did this in a previous post and wondered if you'd noticed. Hmmm? Time to go time.