Write about your most epic baking or cooking fail.
I don’t like thinking about failures in the kitchen for two very good reasons.
First, it’s never something I can laugh about afterwards. As such a good cook I find it deeply irritating. It’s stressful at the time and it gnaws at you afterwards. If it’s a big meal like a Christmas Dinner it’s even worse because you are stressed anyway, so a disaster can cause, and has caused, a meltdown.
Second, a failed meal means wasted money and for many years money was in short supply, so a kitchen disaster was one that I could literally ill afford. How to rescue it was always more of a concern. It’s easy to find it funny in retrospect if you are richer but if you are poorer you can find yourself having to think about the knock on effects before the next paycheck. As such, the ‘comic’ potential of the ‘epic fail’ is self indulgent and reflects your economic good fortune.
Yes, failure in the kitchen, as in any other area of life, is inevitable, but if you can laugh about it afterwards consider yourself lucky.
Share a lesson you wish you had learned earlier in life.
I was always good at writing, and I realised that from the age of about 9 when I was at St Andrew’s Primary School. My creative writing was definitely a cut above and I was able to blend it with my fascination for history. One task we had was to write a newspaper article about a historical event. I chose Nelson and his death at the Battle of Trafalgar, writing it in a journalistic style – as near as a 9 year old could get anyway – but I needed something else to make it stand out. So, I added adverts and reports of a very long bare knuckle boxing match in London! Looking back, the amount of imagination that went into it was high level for my age and it showed me a path that I was eager, at the time, to follow. I was going to become a journalist. Then secondary school happened, the haven for bullies commonly known as Rochester Maths School.
I kept writing creatively while I could, but only one teacher encouraged me to believe that what I wrote was good. Independent of school I tried writing match reports on what I watched on Match of the Day and did so with a good eye for detail and atmosphere. I kept thinking that I should try for a junior position at a local paper but little by little that idea seeped away along with the last of my creative self confidence. I hated the Maths School at the time because it was such a bad experience, but I hate it more now when I realise that it stopped me following a path I could have made a success of. The only huge positive of course is that I found a path in life that led to meeting my wife, so I suppose I should cut it some slack. Actually, no I shouldn’t! It was about as pleasurable an experience as the Borstal young offenders prison just up the road would have been.
So, there you have it. I wish I had learned the lesson that my writing was actually really good much earlier. If I had who knows what I could have achieved?
What are your favorite types of foods?
My favourite foods without exception come directly from our own kitchen. I never enjoy restaurant fare as much as the dishes we make at home. They are the antithesis of my cooking with their liberal use of sugar and salt. I never add salt to any of my meals and when my wife makes cakes or buns she only ever uses half the amount of sugar in the recipes. The result of those decisions are meals and desserts which have subtle flavours and which are healthy for us at an age where good health is so important.
I cook chilli, a favourite dish of mine, a couple of times a month. It is spicy but not overpowering. We make our own pizzas from scratch, with M&S pizzas being the only ones that we will have as an occasional treat such as our 35th anniversary last Monday. They replicate that homemade quality. We make our own bread and rolls from scratch using a bread maker. This has greatly improved the quality and healthiness of our lunches as they don’t have preservatives and excess amounts of salt and sugar.
I know that a trip to a restaurant can be a great treat. I find that it occasionally gives an opportunity to get the family together as part of a birthday celebration or similar and helps to make it more of an event. However, for my 60th birthday this year I insisted on doing the cooking for everyone because I just love putting healthy great tasting food on the table. It’s fantastic for me to see everyone enjoying it. So, that’s why it’s homemade all the way for me.
How often do you walk or run?
I walk pretty much everywhere. Always have done. When I was a young child I was encouraged to enjoy walking in nature and when I got into scouts I became an enthusiastic hiker. The longest walk I took was the Essex Way Walk, a 35 mile, one day challenge that is, to this day, the furthest I have gone in one go.
When I worked up in London, it was almost impossible to walk less than 10000 steps a day, although my tendency to pace around while teaching helped that. Believe it or not I used to walk 2000 steps on average in a 2 hour lesson! Still, I always learnt that it was harder to hit a moving target 😂😂🎯🎯
Over the years I have done a number of walking challenges to raise money for charity. I usually do a short 25km walk, but in 2017 I did the March to the Arch, a marathon length walk in aid of Prostate Cancer UK. It was very taxing physically as you would expect, but it was also the best atmosphere I have ever walked in. We were all there for the same cause and we were required to walk together. I did find that a bit difficult as my tendency is to stride out and finish as quickly as possible. However, I really appreciated the common purpose and it really helped me when I hit the wall after about 22 miles because I was encouraged to finish as I had encouraged others when they were in difficulties. We started off from the New Den, Millwall’s ground, then visited Selhurst Park (Crystal Palace), Craven Cottage (Fulham), Stamford Bridge (Chelsea), Loftus Road (QPR) and finally Wembley Stadium. All but one of them were incredibly welcoming. Only at Craven Cottage were we not made to feel welcome and it’s the reason why I don’t like Fulham to this day!!
My next challenge will probably be a 50km walk along the Thames Path which I will do alongside my son. I am really eager to test myself by taking that distance on and I have already started training. Watch this space!
Do you see yourself as a leader?
I was thrust into leadership positions at a very early age in scouting, first in scouts and then in venture scouts. In both cases I was hopelessly unprepared and absolutely awful. Both my parents were leaders in scouting and I suppose I tried to be the same type of leader as they were, the charismatic type who people followed through force of personality. However, I had no charisma, no idea of what approach to take and was universally detested by the older leaders who, quite rightly, were very annoyed at seeing me make such a mess of it. It was a great relief to me, to them and to the scouts and venture scouts I was nominally in charge of when life sent me in a different direction and ended my connection with scouting for good.
When I became a teacher it was the chance for me to take my own approach to guiding a group of younger people. I stopped trying to lead and started trying to mentor and encourage my students as they made their way in the subjects I taught. When I taught them approaches to Economics or English I did so with the aim of making them less and less reliant on me. Over the past 30 years that seems to have worked at least to some extent and my students, particularly in the EAP field, have gone on to great success which I played a small part in.
I was given the chance to work as a leader in my penultimate full time job. As the Academic Director I combined my mentoring approach with some late developing small scale charisma and had great success I think. Put it this way, the staff and students seemed to appreciate my leadership style. Sadly, that was cut short when the centre was closed, and in my final job it was downhill all the way as my team leader role first diminished and then was removed altogether. It’s frustrating to think both what I could have achieved if my penultimate job had continued and the extent to which my abilities were wasted in my final job.
As with a number of things, I have developed the ability to lead too late. As I got too old to be a good long term option my career wound down to its eventual damp squib of an ending.
What is my advice? Do not follow someone else’s approach to leadership as that never works. Develop your own and stick to it.
