On Bakers and Politics and Perspective

Well, here’s me writing again.

I’ve been on hols, as the British say! And still am. I’m off till Wednesday. Except I’m holidaying wrong as I took on a 6-article project for a new client (delivered this past Monday) and am now embroiled in the head-blending hell of doing tax years 2019 and 2020. Until September, I’d been 4 years behind on my taxes, so I’m happily anxious to put this nightmare behind me in the coming days.

So, a couple things I’m thinking of today, but the one I’m immediately interested in is perspective and its value with troubling times.

I’m on a Great British Baking Show binge – starting my third season this week. I’ve been watching in between furiously setting up my new balcony for a kitchen-garden forest. I envision hiding behind edible plants by about July as they dwarf my tiny balcony. I want to smugly walk past vegetable stands, thinking, “I don’t need your inferior tomatoes! NAY on your flavourless cucumbers!”

Still, I’m having fleeting nightmares that the sheer weight of all my soil, the water therein, and the poundage contributed by myself will send the balcony crashing down, but such is life — and death.

It would be a grand way to go, wouldn’t it? Cause: Death by ambitious gardening. Oh, if only there were one less tomato plant. She died as she ate — well.

But troubling tomatoes aside, I digress. Devotees of the GBBO were verklempt, despondent, aghast when it was announced the BBC had lost the show in a bidding war and the band was breaking up. Mel, Sue, and Mary were hitting the road, only the nasty Silver Fox Paul Hollywood remained, with new hosts to come.

One day, a year or two ago, I got curious and went down the rabbit hole. Why did the band break up?

From what I recall, Sue played an instrumental part in it. When the show leaving the Beebs, she saw an opportunity to cut and run. But why would someone want to leave a job where all they had to do was enjoy bakers panicking over delicious things?

In a word, Cambodia.

Photo: Life on Tonle Sap, Cambodia — just outside Siem Reap. (From BBC’s The Mekong River with Sue Perkins.)

This was not long after Sue did a working holiday in Southeast Asia. She got to do what I’ve always dreamt of – sail up the Mekong River and experience the peoples along the way. She spent time near Tonlé Sap, the incredible lake that ebbs and flows with the great river – a freshwater landscape that floods seasonally to create the largest lake in SE Asia, where people have lived and worked the water for god knows how long.

I was in Cambodia during the dry/low season and had heard things about how touristy the visits could be, so I took a pass.

But Sue got the real deal. She got to see how families struggled to feed themselves, let alone create wealth of any kind. And food – it’s the crux of it all. Without it, we truly have nothing. These people fought so hard to fish in dwindling stock and harvest food, like algae.

[Note: Sue visited Mekong communities in Laos, Cambodia, China, and the Tibetan Plateau – following the great river from its mouth to its source. The series is a 4-parter, available on Netflix sometimes, called The Mekong River, and I highly recommend it.]

Photo: Meeting the locals on Tonle Sap, Cambodia — just outside Siem Reap. (From BBC’s The Mekong River with Sue Perkins.)

So, after this incredible journey, she returned to the GBBO.

Now, having been to Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand’s Isan province, I’ve seen a little of that struggle just in passing. The “real life” I managed to see in these places has probably forever adjusted my perspective on problems – and that’s the real takeaway you’re privileged to get in travel. I know a lot of folks who travel for the good times and great drinks and beautiful places, and they don’t get that perspective because they’re not open to finding it or seeing it or learning from it.

But when you are? Man, it can leave you shook.

Part of the reason I didn’t want to move back to Victoria originally was that I just could not handle a very loud, very political civic arena like Victoria.

Spoiler: The Angry Left is just as loathsome as the Angry Right. They’re both people who have little perspective on what’s HARD in life and their righteous indignation in not having the ideal society around them is hard to fathom.

Photo: Success! Harvesting algae on the Mekong River with Sue Perkins. (From BBC’s The Mekong River with Sue Perkins.)

I don’t want to get into politics, but the last thing I wanted at the end of four years of really, really ‘seeing’ the world was returning to a city where someone in $125 yoga pants two-fisting an $8 hemp shake was telling me how hard done by they were over the latest political embattlements.

Meanwhile, I know what it’s like to watch as two kids under age 10 scour through garbage cans under the jasmine-scented Cambodian night air.

Yeah, you’re so fucking hard done by there, Yoga Pants-Hemp Shaker.

Unfortunately, I discovered that element isn’t a Victoria thing, it’s largely a white North American thing, so moving to Ottawa meant I just got the same-same-but-different glimpse from the other side of the political spectrum, with disciples of Tim Horton’s railing at the world’s inequities with a double-double* in one hand and a maple-glazed donut in the other.

Evidently, Sue had the same struggle, but what she couldn’t stomach was returning to GBBO, where people had nuclear-level meltdowns over whether their pastry was properly laminated, or the buttercream would split in the heat.

Photo: Sue Perkins consoles a baker towards the end of her time with the series, I think it was her final year. This is the year after she came back from the Mekong and stood out as a significant moment for me, because she seemed so baffled how people could be so emotionally invested in… flour.

Once you’ve seen the stoicism of how these people in truly devastating conditions could motor through life’s hardships, it’s hard to take people seriously when they’re frothing at the mouth over a bike lane or a batch of buns.

There’s a lot of that in the pandemic too. So much entitlement and delusional anger about how hard their lives supposedly are, when the whole goddamned planet is enduring this at the same time – and far too many of them under demagogues or dictators who don’t have the moral or emotional capacity to be the right kind of leader needed in a public health crisis.

Again, I don’t want to get into all that. Suffice to say I’ve spent a week planting a patio garden so I could have a peaceful place to spend time, and a meaningful hobby to keep me preoccupied until life returns to a “new normal” this fall. Because all I can control, really, is myself and how I react to the situation around me — and that’s a lesson I learned abroad, where people live in all kinds of difficult political and economic climates, but they live their life while it’s all going down.

Photo: From BBC’s The Mekong River with Sue Perkins. I think this was in Laos. Not sure.

I understand the whole Rumi-esque concept that pain is pain is pain on a relative scale. Because, while losing my mother with “a week to a month’s” notice is the depth of my personal loss, maybe the only thing someone else has lost is the dog they loved with every bone of their being. Pain is relative – that’s what they know as loss versus what I know.

But the beauty of travel is that we can have glimpses of the Other Lives. We can imagine. We can try to empathize. We can be haunted in waking moments about things we’ve seen. We can appreciate how incredible it is when people have so little but can be so generous. We can learn from how others cope by living in the moment despite monumental societal strife all around them.

Perspective on life is everything.

It won’t solve your problems. It won’t pay your rent. It won’t be the hug you need in a pandemic. But it’ll help you see it through.

Because the thing to take away from these people in faraway lands is – every little thing you do to get yourself through the day helps. And when life is hard, focus on the life right in front of you – not the global picture, the political strife, and all that shit. Just focus on your day and get through it how you can.

I imagine, though, that having a nice garden helps.

Photo: From BBC’s The Mekong River with Sue Perkins. I think this was also in Laos. Lunch, anyone?

So, this summer I’ll be growing a kitchen garden. Whenever Twitter and Facebook get stupid, I can go fondle some arugula and fuss over some herbs in the fresh air. When work is tiring, I can take 10 minutes to putter. When the day is long, I can enjoy an evening with the perfume of herbs around me. It’s not much, but it’ll be my reprieve from the uncontrollable world around me.

In the meantime – we have science and scientists. We have free, accessible vaccines. We have FaceTime and Zoom and texting and so many more ways of bridging this pandemic, which no other society has ever had before. We live in a remarkable, capable time and it’s inspiring to see how the world’s scientists banded together to confront one of the scariest challenges of our age.

But now we have another – the climate crisis. I’m hoping that this staggering display of scientific community can translate to our other existential crisis, the one we have not yet solved. And there are things each of us can do to effect the changes needed for our success in that crisis.

Ultimately, though, for whatever is within our power to change, there are so many things we can’t. As one GBBO baker liked to say – John Whaite, who went on to win season 3 – “what’s done is done and can’t be undone.”

And when all else fails, there’s cake.

Just don’t cry over it.

Thanks for reading. If you haven’t subscribed for free for the latest posts, please do. Please feel free to share with friends and on social media. And do check out The Mekong River. [In writing this, I’ve discovered she has done several other short travel specials, including the Ganges River, the US-Mexican border, Japan, and Kolkata (aka Calcutta) — I guess I have some digging to do.]

Steff

[*This is a Canuckism. A double-double is a coffee with two creams and two sugars.]