Covid

Wednesday

Jason Goodwin

Bread is the staff of life

I cannot claim the gift of prophecy, but early in 2020 — before lockdown panic-buying and the warnings of a dire wheat harvest causing bread-price rises — I became a bread-maker. I dug around on the internet for a good recipe for sourdough, and found one padded out with the usual bloggery and waffle. Absent the philosophy and the pious musings, it gives a clear, sensible route to bread self-sufficiency. Sourdough doesn’t need bought-in yeast, only a ‘starter’ of flour and water. This is often called a ‘mother’, and attracts wild yeasts as it develops; after five days in the jar it is a gently bubbling ferment of living yeasts, and you keep it going by adding flour and water to it day by day.

bread

Wednesday

Mary Kate Skehan

Help yourself to self-help

Self-help has been a popular American pastime at least since Dr Diocletian Lewis toured the countryside in the 19th century. Dr Dio preached to huge, rapt crowds about the salutary effects of gymnastics, chastity, sobriety and loose clothing. He eventually cofounded the temperance movement. Having deprived Americans of their preferred entertainment, Dr Dio went on to invent the beanbag. A century later, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey sold tens of millions of copies and inspired spinoffs for families, companies and teens, as I learned when my mother gave me a copy during a particularly ineffective period of my adolescence. Covey, a Mormon, was the spiritual heir to the clean-living crusaders of the temperance movement.

self-help
david icke
Paul Wood

The mad world of David Icke

Americans might need reminding about David Icke. He was a British soccer player who went on to become a popular sports presenter for BBC television in the Eighties, and that’s how most people thought of him until he popped up on the Wogan talk show in 1991 and agreed that, yes, the reports were true: he was the Son of God. Icke appeared with a mullet haircut, a turquoise tracksuit — turquoise is ‘the frequency of love and wisdom’ — and the blank eyes of a madman. The world would end in 1997, he told the audience, who reacted with laughter. He replied that people had laughed at Jesus too. The laughter was liberating. The mockery of the small-minded lost its sting and he became a proto-Alex Jones, the TV conspiracy theorist host of Infowars, only with more mysticism.