The Great About one million of them are Scots.
Think of it: one million folk suffering from the same mass hallucination, as if they had all been drinking from the same LSD-laced public water supply.
I refer, of course, to the populace currently watching the TV smash hit, The Great British Bake Off, which, from Land’s End to John O’ Groats, has got grans and grandpas, mums and dads and even – whisper it - sullen, “I want to be alone in my room with my 42 electronic devices” teenagers glued to the box as black forest gateaux tumble tragically to their doom amid the tears of contestants.
The show is being given the sort of media treatment reserved for a crisis or two in The Voice and Britain’s Got Talent, and Mary Berry, one of the Bake Off judges, at the ripe old age of eighty, is accorded the sort of cult star status reserved for Hollywood A list celebrities. She pops up on chat shows all over the place to show us what she can do with her pavlovas (a meringue and fruit confection, incidentally, which may one day lead to war between Australia and New Zealand as both countries lay claim to its invention).
And it is, of course, all absolute hokum. The younger generations these days, by and large, can barely boil an egg.
A
LL COUNTRIES, of course, have their own idiosyncrasies and
national delusions. For example, Scotland thinks it is a footballing nation.
That folie de grandeur can be easily exposed by a swiſt check of the record books; the country hasn’t qualified for a World Cup this century. However, on the menu for consideration here is another fantasy: there are more than nine million people in Britain who believe they can bake.
74 September 2015
What people are in love with is the thought of baking; it makes them feel good about themselves. But, in truth, they have been orphaned from the tastes and textures of genuine home-made food and fancies for nigh on half a century.
Yes, yes... the purchases of baking products and paraphernalia have seldom been higher. Supermarkets gleefully stockpile cake mixes, nuts and raisins and all manner of gleaming instruments and bread-making machines and whisks and sieves; recipe book sales are on the up and up.
There is even a claim being touted around by a retail analyst company that three-fiſths of adults have baked at home at least once this year compared with one-third four years ago. Even more incredibly, their survey showed that a quarter of adults bake every week.
To the pure, all things are pure, I suppose. But I would respectfully suggest to the pollsters that they are being told a load of old cobblers. How many homes have you visited of late where you have
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