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Health Foods for the Mind or The Power of Cake

I recently began a course on Cognitive Behaviour Therapy. Very interesting stuff. Those of you who haven’t come across it might like to know that it’s really just a way of saying that everything you do affects how you think and how you feel, and vice versa. So by changing a behaviour pattern you can change your thought pattern, and thus feel differently. It’s a well-used and highly effective treatment for many different psychological issues, but particularly for depression. The analogy of the treatment was described to all of us on the course during the first evening as ‘The Hot Cross Bun’. See below:

Now this image appealed to me for its simplicity and symmetry, but mainly struck a chord because I’m a huge fan of cake. And buns. If I could retrain my brain using the model of a yeasty cake, marvellous!

So I threw myself into this course with great vigour, and went home with my homework: “Use the hot-cross bun tool to analyse a real-life situation that has been problematical”. I decided to have a good think about it and make sure I got the work done by the following week. However, life has a habit of intervening in the best plans, and so with a new term starting for my three children, homework, planning and teaching for me and all that jazz, of course I realized it was Monday again and I had not prepared my hot cross bun. Damn it. I went to the course anyway, made my apologies and made up my situation on the spot. Which was rather stressful and left me feeling anxious and guilty, worse than I’d felt when I’d arrived. But I thought, “Ok, I’ll plan in exactly when I can do my homework, and this will be my target for next week.” The following week’s homework was more hot-cross bunnery, using another tricky situation to look at how I could change my behaviour to get positive change in thoughts, feelings and physical symptoms. Great, I thought, I’ll use my inability to plan my homework as my hot-cross bun and then I’ll get it done whilst effectively solving that problem.

So I got home, did all the usual things that I usually do, went to work, drove to Somerset and back, taught a bit more, attended meetings, did housey stuff and attended to children round the clock. And suddenly it was of course Monday again. Still hadn’t done my blooming homework, and now the pressure was really mounting. I was going to look seriously flakey to go two weeks in a row with the same excuse. So I could tell the truth and look flakey, or come up with a plausible reason why for the second week in a row I’d flunked my homework. I decided to go with the non-flakey, or at least, the less flakey option and would say that I had done the homework, but I’d left it at home. (I congratulated myself on my originality – surely as a teacher I could come up with something a little more imaginative?) I girded my loins and went to the course.

By the end of the evening, I was fretful and irritated with myself and feeling really quite depressed. Which was a shame, as I’d begun the day quite cheerful and full of the joys of spring. Or autumn. I drove home, parked outside my house and stomped inside thinking about hot-cross buns. “Never mind hot, ” I thought, “I’m now just cross”. And then the thought leapt into my head: make buns! Make big lovely, steamingly delicious buns that drown your sorrows and love violent kneading. So abandoning my gloom, I rushed to my messy kitchen and pulled ingredients from the cupboards.

Two hours later, with the potent smell of cinnamon, butter and sugar wafting round the house, and little bits of dough clinging to my fingers, front and kitchen table, I felt much better. Something about putting raw ingredients into a bowl and then mixing, kneading and leaving to rise gives me huge pleasure. I love to know that regardless of how I’m feeling, regardless of what evils are happening in the world around me, provided the room is warm enough those little yeasty cells will get to work and just respire themselves silly. And poof! What was flat, flabby dough is now bubbly and light, almost alcoholic in odour, and full of a burgeoning optimism. Throw in some butter and sugar, turn them into caramel which is a little burnt around the edges of the buns, add ladles of cinnamon and put in the oven. Then just watch it grow. The marvel of rising cakes or bread never fails to cheer me. Nor the way the smell of the luscious cake pre-empts the eating of it. I love the way the top floor of my house (where I’m writing this) still smells of cinnamon and baking long after we’ve eaten the cake.

So I’ve decided that since it is pretty impossible to chisel enough time out of the day both to attend a course and to do the follow-up written work, I shall abandon the course but continue with the Hot-Cross Bun. I do believe in the restorative power of cake, of yeasty little buns with or without dried fruit inside. I do think that careful consideration of how we behave is a useful way to break a negative cycle of thoughts. I am sure too, that taking action is always better than worrying about taking it and so I shall definitely be using hot-cross buns in my self-treatment.

I shall also be using Norwegian cinnamon rolls, giant cheese and tomato picnic loaves, brownies, Danish pastries and pasta. In fact, if I can bake it and eat it, it will be part of my plan. If I can knead it, roll it, watch it rise or change shape somehow, and constantly wonder at how food does that, I know that I’m doing myself good.

Just don’t make me do homework.

Because you're special...

There’s nothing like a two-hour car journey to create the perfect space for mother-son bonding. Particularly when the son hates maintaining eye contact but loves a captive audience of one. Perfect.

So my regular Monday morning trip to Somerset with Corin is the weekly setting for topical exploration that ranges from consideration of the qualities of a V8 engine, wondering what exactly do Qinetic make in their super-secret weapons base on Salisbury plain, whether cows would enjoy having caterpillar tracks instead of legs, and our latest, why we hate the euphemism “special”.

Corin goes to a Special school. It’s an Asperger school run by the Priory Group, and on the sign outside its attractive gravelled driveway, the school is subtitled ” A Priory Special School”. Our conversation began by Corin telling me with considerable amusement how one of the boys had got into trouble for defacing the sign. He was apparently protesting about the use of particular language, and had changed the word ‘special’ to ‘freak’.

“Isn’t that worse, though?” I asked, “surely a ‘special school’ is a better way of describing your college than ‘freak school’?”

“No, of course not,” Corin replied, “It’s just saying things how they actually are, unlike saying ridiculous things like ‘special’”.

“Why’s ‘special’ ridiculous then? Isn’t it a good way of looking at Aspergers Syndrome?”

“No. It’s crap.”

I then start a rather unconvincing explanation of why people use the word special to describe anyone else with a disability, in what, at the time, I think is a calming tone of voice, but is actually just me trying to say all the usual old rubbish. Corin quickly deflates me with his riposte:

“You see, Mum, now you’re doing it too. Probably what happened was one day a child was told they had some disability or other, got really upset, and then their mum said, ‘don’t worry darling, it means you’re really special’ and they believed it. And it probably was quite a nice thing to say. Just once. But not any more. ‘Special’ is no better than ‘retard’ frankly. So you might as well say freak, because I don’t mind ‘freak’. It’s just patronising to have someone say you’re special when really they think you’re a weirdo. Because then ‘special’ really just means ‘weirdo’.”

How true. And this set me thinking. When someone happily, as a neurotypical individual describes someone on the autistic spectrum, or anyone else who has any kind of disability as ‘special’,  it is really only to make themselves feel better as humans: they can imagine themselves to be people who truly understand. The person with a disability has no need of the label to feel singled out for specialness, as they undoubtedly feel singled out already. But even so, I know that I do it too. And I hate that I do it. I hate it too, when my twelve-year-old points out that I am being facile and actually, slightly dishonest with him. But he’s right, and I admire his ability to see through the fluff of what we say to one another.

So we continued our journey across Salisbury Plain, over the hills, laughing like drains at all the different and inappropriate moments when we could swap the word ‘special’ for ‘freak’. One of my favourites was Corin’s suggestion that the ‘special forces’ become the ‘freak forces’: well we said, who would mess with them? ‘Special Policemen’ become just that bit more interesting, as does the SAS (do they have helpers, we wondered), and in our favourite coffee shop, the staff were clearly puzzled by our hysterical inability to speak without snorting when confronted by the ‘specials’ board.

This ‘special’ conversation of ours crops up at odd and random moments, often and usually inappropriately timed, which gives us regular cause for a fit of the giggles. I wonder if I should be steering Corin in a more acceptable euphemistic direction, as his mother? Some would say so.

And I suppose I shouldn’t really approve – we should spare a thought for all the freaks out there. But then I count myself in that number. And, you know what? I don’t freakin’ mind.

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