I just spent the last half hour preparing a loaf of banana bread, on the basis that it would be a crime to throw away three perfectly good but over-ripe bananas. By the time you’ve added the cost of the other ingredients, the gas for the oven and the woman-hours, I agree I probably should just have dinged them in the trash can and cut my losses but, well, it is Sunday afternoon.

The recipe I used was one of my mother’s and so used archaic weights and measures like ounces and gills, so I needed conversion tables as well as a bionic arm to cream the butter and sugar to a state of light fluffitude. Which got me thinking about said mother, and how, when I was a little girl and she was baking a cake, my job was to scrape out the bowl and lick the spoon clean of that yummy uncooked cake mixture. 

Kids don’t get to do that any more. I know this because my oldest daughter is a great baker but her children belong to a generation that aren’t allowed to eat uncooked egg. Not only that. They’re not permitted to take home-baked goods to school on say, their birthday, for their classmates to eat during morning break because there may be somebody who has an allergy, or has read about allergies. Or is thinking of developing an allergy. 

Excuse me madam, can you guarantee that this banana loaf contains no trace of nuts?

Hey, I can’t even guarantee that my banana loaf hasn’t had contact with the floor.

Sure smells good, though. Oink, oink.