In which baked goods save the day

Monday was super Mondayish in almost every way. The weather was filthy and I woke up out of sorts with myself and the world in general. In the last few months before we moved I had been wrestling with my mental health with varying degrees of success. Since we moved, I have felt much more energised and like my old self and it was a bit of a kicker to wake up feeling bleak again.

Stupid really. I know better than most that mental health does not care about where you live or whether real life is good, bad or indifferent. It has its own weather systems and some days, if a low front moves in, it just has to be endured. I am just grateful that I have been blessed with more good days than bad in recent weeks.

And I walked. Of course I did. Walking here helps in a way that I’ve never found anywhere else. I have strange, psychogeographical theories about this city. I believe that places are a bit like batteries. The more people are around them, the more life lived in them, the more charged up they get, either through the kinetic energy of people coming and going or through emotions and invocations to places. I think that some places are attuned to some people and by being in those places you can connect to the energy they hold.

People expect this to happen in churches or holy sites. I rarely feel like that in those places. To me, they tend to feel empty. It feels like too many people have taken from them and not enough people are replenishing them. This city though, it feels properly alive to me. It breathes for me when I can’t quite manage it on my own, and I am so grateful.

So I put my coat on, put my head down and walked. Things I would normally stop and marvel at I barrelled on by with barely a second glance. I wasn’t in the mood to find the world charming. I found myself in the middle of Poplar with no inspiration but not ready to go back. I fell back on a trick I used to use when walking with the children. We would follow a bus route, so that if we all got sick of each other or someone’s legs dropped off, we could just cross the road and wait for a bus to take us back.

I followed my bus route through to Bow Road where I began to feel a bit brighter. I wanted to go further afield but now my legs were hurting, so I found the nearest bus stop and got on the next bus that pulled up to see where it would take me (another trick I learned from herding children with very little money and a lot of time to kill). The bus was going all the way to Holborn, but I figured I’d hop off at St. Paul’s and follow the river home.

In the end I got off at Stepney Green because the man sitting behind me sucked his teeth every thirty seconds and it was either get off the bus or punch him in the face and as I had only just started to feel better I didn’t want to ruin the rest of the day with a trip to the nearest police station on a charge of affray.

It was extremely fortuitous that I got off where I did, because when I typed ‘things to do in Stepney Green’ into my phone it pointed me at Rinkoff’s Bakery, which was a five minute walk away and it was then that I realised I was starving. My stars had aligned and I practically ran down the high street, noting several very exciting looking biryani shops along the way and a very odd restaurant across the road that served both Thai food and also pies. Not Thai pies, because I checked. Regular pies. It is of course, called Thai n Pie and I feel I need to go there even though it may well be truly awful, because the name is so compelling and the concept so weird.

I rounded the corner into the street where the bakery lay and was hit by the smell of warm bread, wafting towards me. I felt like one of the Bisto Kids, following the delicious aroma to its source. It felt like a tiny miracle. It tasted like heaven. I bought a sort of Danish pastry. Like a pain aux raisin but the whirl was held together with a dark, not particularly sweet chocolate mixture and it had a generous handful of chopped pistachios on top. I bought cakes and bread to take home but couldn’t wait to eat my pastry. I tore at it like a savage, and managed to rip a hefty chunk off as I was crossing the road. I looked up with a huge curl of pastry hanging out of my face and horrified the people crossing the other way. That cheered me up enormously.

Fortified by outrage and cake, I perked right up on the last leg of my journey, which saw me sailing out of Stepney straight into Whitechapel and being very pleased to connect the pieces in my mental map. I noted some things I wanted to come back and explore another, less mentally grey day and came home on the Elizabeth Line into Canary Wharf. I came back to the boat, triumphant with the spoils of my forage and was highly praised for my hunting skills.