JUST WHAT YOU KNEAD

When recently retired magazine editor Roger Borrell started baking his own bread, he not only discovered a new passion, but also, via the aisles of Booths, an iconic Stockport mill producing award-winning flour

- Roger Borrell

When I decided to swap my career as a hyper-ventilating wage slave for life as a semi-professional layabout I made myself a bucket list. One with a difference.

This wasn’t a ‘must-do-before-I-die’ litany of stuff like swimming with dolphins or learning ballroom dancing. For a start, I don’t have the legs for the tango and where do you find a dolphin in Cheshire (apart from The Dolphin pub in Macclesfield)?

No, this was a list of things I aimed NEVER to do during my so-called golden years. It included never watching daytime TV (especially Flog It!), never getting angry about millennials accusing us baby boomers of being a drain on society even though I’ve paid income tax and national insurance for 40-plus years and, most importantly, I would never make those strange groaning noises old people emit whenever they sit down or stand up. Or, hopefully, any other noises.

Fourth on the list was a promise that I would never again eat rubbish bread. For decades, ridiculous deadlines forced me to inhale whatever piece of indigestible stodge happened to be adjacent to the mayo-flecked keyboard I was bashing. No more. In future, I would eat healthy and largely wholemeal and, what’s more, I would make it myself.

This required some smelling salts in the Borrell household where, as the scullery boy, I rarely did anything more adventurous than the odd heart attack breakfast for weekend guests.

I almost fell at the first hurdle when an acquaintance who ran bread-making classes suddenly emigrated to the South Pacific. Not sure if there was a connection. That left me with YouTube videos, a very good book on bread-making from the Women’s Institute and a rather fetching black pinny. My baking might be awful, but I’d do it with considerable dash.