Feeding the black dog

I’ve not posted for a while, and the reason is that I’ve been in hospital, on a psychiatric ward. Not for the first time.

This is a blog about making bread, and not about mental health. But it occurs to me that you can’t blog on any subject – not honestly – and leave yourself entirely out of the frame. It was a long time before I worked up the courage to start a blog at all, because I am not the kind of person who finds it easy to express anything publicly – even something as innocuous as an opinion on the subject of making bread. And yet the very existence of this blog owes something to my depressingly fragile mental state.

My passion for baking was the logical product of a youthful interest in food and cooking. It was only during my first spell in a psychiatric hospital, though, that it became something more meaningful and consuming. Following a nervous breakdown some years ago, and in a state approaching despair, the one ‘normal’ thing I found I was able to think about was baking. It seems almost comical to admit it now, but at the time it seemed like the only thing that kept me tethered to the world that everyone else seemed to inhabit.

When I got out of hospital, I started baking in earnest, and have not stopped since. There are plenty of times when it hasn’t even seemed particularly therapeutic. But I keep doing it, and sometimes it makes me happy.