The Bard and The Bread: My TV show idea is on a roll (or is it a cob?) - Ian McMillan
I’m a big fan of the American short story writer John Cheever; he was an amazing maker of sentences and constructor of paragraphs and one of his most famous stories is The Swimmer, which was made into a film starring Burt Lancaster in a pair of trunks.
The story is simple: a man decides to cross his town by swimming rather than walking or taking the bus. He uses pools, rivers, streams and the story has a surprise ending which I won’t reveal here but I’d urge you to seek the story out.
A while ago, when the craze for trampolines in the garden was in its bouncy infancy, I had a fantasy about recreating The Swimmer by seeing if I could get across a small-to-medium-sized town using only the trampoline, bouncing from garden to garden.
The advantage of that method of transport was that I wouldn’t have to wear trunks. Of course the idea just stayed as an idea, as so many of my ideas do.
But then recently I had another idea along those lines when, with someone from Lancashire, I entered into the endlessly entertaining bread cake/tea cake debate and I realised that I could attempt to traverse the country by going into local bakers and asking for a small lump of bread but only using the accepted description of that lump of bread.
In other words, I couldn’t go into a shop in Norwich and ask for a cob. They would just tell me they were fresh out of male swans.
You all know the kind of linguistic traps this would lead me into; I would have metaphorical egg on my face as well as real flour on my hands.
It might make a comedy series for Channel 5: The Bard and The Bread, they could call it. I can see it now, winning award after award. I’d better send my dicky bow to the cleaners.
Cards on the table: what some people in different parts of the country call a teacake I call a breadcake.
If it’s got currants in it, it’s a currant teacake and of course because I’m from Barnsley I call a currant a curran but that’s a whole other series for Channel 5.
The show could start in the borders of Scotland where, unaccountably, a loaf is sometimes called a half-loaf.
My dad was from that part of the world and he’d often send me to the shop when I was little for a half-loaf and my mother, a Barnsley lass, would whisper to me that he meant a loaf. I often wondered what two loaves would be for him: a full loaf, presumably.
If I was further up towards the north of Scotland I’d have a morning roll or a bridie, of course. And one I’d had my half-loaf I’d venture on a howie. I’d then get the train to Newcastle and have stottie after stottie.
Over in Cumbria I’d have a cob or a bap and then in Yorkshire’s wide acres I’d enjoy a bread cake and a tea cake and the aforementioned currant teacake and a scuffler and maybe even, from the bottom of the oven, an oven-bottomer.
Down in Crewe I’d have a batch and in Manchester I’d munch on a barm cake, or just a barm. The Midlands is the southern home of the morning roll which has an empire that stretches as far as the Isle of Wight.
I’ll just sit in Cornwall and eat this Oggie. I’m ready for my close up: what Michael Portillo is to railways, I could be for bread!