What do you do on a rainy bank holiday monday when you’ve just spent 2 hours with the granddaughter and had her wrenched screaming (me, not her) from my vice-like grip? You bake a cake, that’s what real men do. A cheesecake in fact. Which I’ve never made but my mum made the best everrrrrr and I was hoping it might be a genetic thing, so at least I’d have half a good cheesecake. Still baking so I’ll let you know.

So with my assistant, who always knows best, even though she’s only there to hold the beaters for me, we baked. And when you bake you need music, right? Its on the top of every recipe. Just before ‘measure out 250gms of flour’ it says ‘put on some 1970s rock music so fucking loud that the milk curdles’. That’s how I read it. Then it said ‘separate 2 eggs’, so I put one in the garage and left the other in the fridge. So far so good. Its only following a recipe for gawd’s sake.

But the music is important. And we have an Amazon player thingy. You know, its like having a permanent Chinese spy in your kitchen who eats nothing and can sing you any of 40 million songs upon request. She’s called Alexa but I thing Gung Ho or Kwai Chang might be more appropriate. But that 40 million is actually for real, as claimed by Amazon. So we can all hear what we want, right? Kind’a right; we can all hear what we want but not necessarily at the same time.

So we started, under the assistant’s instruction, with Ed Shearan. She loves Ed Shearan. After the second track I was about to put Alexa in the fucking blender, but instead played some common ground. Steely Dan. We both love that. But then one of us kind’of goes onto song-association-football mode and starts playing tracks that the previous one reminds me of, maybe due to the time, maybe the tone, maybe who knows. But we ended up with the Groundhogs. Mel wasn’t impressed but I was. Firstly that you can get such an obscure band so easily and then with their phenomenal mix of 70s rock in ultra-jazz time signatures. From there we went to Islands in the stream, always safe, then onto Jolene. And then, quite logically really, to ‘Stand by your Man’. Which, if ever the society for Male Chauvinist Pigs, Misogynists, wife-beaters and Bad Motherfuckers needed an anthem, that would be it.

Because poor Tammy Wynette advises you (sistas) to ‘stand by your man’, cos, after all, he’s just a man. Which may sound patronising and pathetic but is actually a blanket excuse for all and any of man’s failings and shortcomings. However big a shit he is: stand by him. Either Tammy put back the feminist movement by 25 years or Nashville is exempt from such things altogether. Either way I’m now going to fly a confederate flag from Lila’s pram. You’re never too young to make a political statement.

Happy Bank Holiday Monday

A xxxx