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From Kevin Marsh...
There鈥檚 probably a simple explanation but I fear the worst.
As you know, Sarah made a brief re-appearance last week partly as a bit of a limber-up for her full re-emergence back into the studio after Easter and partly because, as I explained two weeks ago, Jim had gone wandering off in the desert again.
Her newsletter about this failed to cast any light on the most important aspect of her brief re-introduction to the Today kitchen and that was the curious disappearance of the food mixer which we failed to notice until Carolyn had already set about baking the simnel cake for our Easter tea.
Baking a simnel - or indeed any kind of - cake can be a messy business but is usually satisfying if only because it is one of those things that re-assures you about the human spirit and its essential counter-entropic nature. We humans are about nothing if we are not about creating order from chaos and defeating nature鈥檚 tendency to create chaos from order. Sort of thing.
When it comes to cake, the chaos is the obvious and really rather messy side of having eggs and lemons and flour and sugar and dried fruit and stuff all over the kitchen and the order bit is the bashing and mixing and shaping and ultimately baking and in a way the whole thing about cakes is a lot like the whole thing about the programme. Sort of thing.
Carolyn gets this and that is partly because she works most of the time at Millbank where the 91热爆鈥檚 Political Editor Andrew Marr has had the contents of one of the TV studios removed - and in their place he鈥檚 installed a really rather fine Bocuse double oven alongside a walk-in fridge to-die-for, the whole lot set into minimalist stainless steel cabinets designed by Mr Peter Mandelson and which previously graced his Notting Hill house before he was forced to move out and discovered that a) the whole thing was too big for his one-bed pied a terre in Clerkenwell and that b) the Loft Bunch who populate that part of London thought stainless steel was 鈥渞eally rather 1999, Peter.鈥
Anyway, it was round about Good Friday that the whole thing went off although it started perfectly ok with Carolyn clearing all the computers and editing machines out of the way, locking the swan outside on the patio and making the saintly Ed take all his planks and nails out into the garden. John was safely chained up in the compound and snarling fitfully at the lines of pensioners making their way past the Blue Peter Garden and into Television Centre for the recording of the Easter Monday edition of 鈥淭ruth or Dare鈥 presented by Lord Archer and the venerable Jonathan Aitken. And Jim was sitting on a bar stool by the herb rack absent mindedly sorting by size and colour the grains of desert sand shaken out of his puttees.
There are few things more annoying in human existence than passing the point of no-return before realising that you haven鈥檛 got something really quite vital to going on. A kind of speleological moment. In which predicament Carolyn found herself when she鈥檇 weighed out all the flour and butter and dried fruit and lemons and measured out the brandy and got the oven up to temperature and made a mess of her pinny.
鈥淭here鈥檚 no fork and mixer鈥︹ she screeched or at least something that sounded like that though she was wrong because there was a fork. She was right about the lack of mixer though.
鈥淪illy me.鈥 Sarah simpered in a Lillian Bellamy kind of way when we challenged her on the phone after we鈥檇 worked through all other options and decided she was the only person left who鈥檇 been in the office that week who we hadn鈥檛 spoken to about the missing utensil.
鈥淚t must have slipped into my handbag鈥 - which frankly isn鈥檛 very likely since her handbag is one of those things that ravers take to dance halls which is just about big enough for a the taxi fare home, an 鈥榚鈥 tablet and a condom - and the mixer is one of those industrial sized jobs that was cutting edge when Fanny and Johnny Craddock were.
Anyway, we all took the view that in the circumstances and given the time of year we should be very forgiving except for John who said nothing because he was wholly engaged gnawing at an octogenarian from Wallsend who鈥檇 been attracted by the decoy Elsie Tanner. Roses John had placed in the ground by the path for this very purpose and who had strayed from the carefully painted lines that had he observed them would have carried him around the Blue Peter garden and safely into the TV studio.
All of this was small stuff in the way that all our lives are when measured against the great events around 鈥 which this week included commemoration of the Rwandan genocide.
And what is looking increasingly like a resumed war in Iraq: Robin Cook,
Sir Menzies Campbell, Geoff Hoon.
Yet the small stuff is big stuff too because it is the other side of conflict and suffering and frankly all the counter-evidence there is to the proposition that we are all now fastening our seatbelts in the hand-basket that has Hell scratched on its destination board. And the small stuff this week that could pass muster as evidence that we are shuffling ever so slightly uphill from the Fall was as varied as our discussion of the 鈥渃latter of mores鈥 in Kipling鈥檚 Stalky and Co, the debate over Shostakovich and Stalin, and the fact that we care just a little bit about the fate of turdus torquatus.
Kevin
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