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[email protected]P
icture the scene: we are filming the
opening link for The Great British
Bake Off. Here I am in the woods,
dressed in a lion suit; Paul Hollywood
is the Tin Man, Sandi Toksvig the
Scarecrow, and, guess what, Noel
Fielding is Dorothy. I leap out on to
the yellow brick road, roaring — I feel
a hammer blow to my ankle, and end
up whimpering like the Cowardly Lion
I’m portraying. I have snapped my
Achilles tendon. Danny the medic, who
has had nothing more exciting than
bakers’ cut fingers to deal with for three
years, finally gets to use his ambulance,
wheelchair and considerable skills. He
doses me with painkillers and sticks my
foot in a bucket containing more ice than
water. Soon the agony of that has wiped
out any injury pain. An hour later I’m
back in my lion suit, this time held up by
Dorothy and the Tin Man, one on each
side. We grin at the camera. ‘Welcome
to The Great British Bake Off!’
I
’m now in a ‘Beckham boot’, in a
wheelchair or on crutches. Before
I’d even got home, hubby John had
bought me psychedelic sticks from
Cool Crutches and a wheelchair (sadly
standard black). The chair is wonderfully
designed for the occupier, but hell
for the carer. The handles are too low
and John now has backache and a
dodgy hip. But I’m grateful to both
crutches and wheelchair. They allow
me to do absolutely nothing, while
everyone fetches and carries around
me. John invited 20 people to lunch
at the weekend, I happily forwent my
usual cooking, tidying, flower-arranging
and fussing with the placement. The
(excellent) poached salmon and salade
Niçoise came from Roger the French
fishmonger in Chipping Norton, and
everyone mucked in while I queened it.
B
ooked a year ago to do a cookery
demo and talk on a Riviera cruise
for Good Housekeeping readers, I could
hardly welch. I’d rather hoped that, on
hearing I was in a wheelchair, they’d say:
‘Sorry, impossible, stairs everywhere.’
But the reaction was: ‘No worries, we’re
a modern ship, entirely accessible.’ My
experience of gigs on cruise ships is not
great. The last one was described by my
nearest and dearest as ‘a cross between
an old-age home and a golf club you don’t
want to join’. But this one was brilliant,
with ace food and comfy cabins. There is
something magical about cruising on the
level with the water, the wide stretches
of river dotted with swans, or with cows
standing in the shallows to a background of
green countryside — like a Cuyp painting.W
e are told you have to ‘walk in
someone’s shoes’ to understand their
predicament. Or sit in a wheelchair. I’d noidea how many pavements have a nice
slope to the street on one corner but on
the other side there’s a big step up —
and there you are, stuck in the road. Or
how often people park in front of the
disabled access, or how some ‘accessible
toilets’, like the one I used at Gatwick,
are too small to turn a wheelchair in,
the door opening inwards so you end up
being rescued by a stranger responding
to your banging the door with a crutch.H
ad brekker with the PM in the
garden of No. 10 to publicise the
new government review on hospital
food. The Downing Street can-do
atmosphere is infectious. Yes, we’ve
heard it all before. But what’s different
this time is that Health Secretary Matt
Hancock is the prime mover, and he’s
appointed Phil Shelley, one of the good
guys in hospital catering, to chair the
taskforce, and Henry Dimbleby to sit
on it. Henry did the School Food Plan
for Michael Gove and now leads his
National Food Strategy, so he knows
a thing or two about food and politics.
The government seems to have at last
rumbled that food is important. I believe,
and I hope I’m right, that this is not a PR
exercise to make ministers look good,
after which it will be quietly shelved.
Personally, I shall press for real cooking
back in hospitals, that caterers are better
equipped to do a decent job, and that
patients get tailor-made diets that fit
their medical, ethnic and personal needs.
That means two things: conviction and
money. Boris has both in his gift.B
ack on location, I had supper in
the hotel with my make-up stylist
Bambi. Reluctant to leave a third of a
bottle of wine and a whole bottle of fizzy
water undrunk, we decided to take them
back to our rooms. Making our way
through the crowded bar, Bambi pushing
and me with a bottle in each hand, we
heard the familiar: ‘Oh, it’s the Bake Off
lady off the telly.’ Aware of the danger of
my being papped in a bar in a wheelchair
clutching two bottles, Bambi took off
like a rocket, shouting ‘’scuse me, ’scuse
me’ as we scattered drinkers left and
right. It’s not all bad, being wheelchair-
bound. I plan to make the most of it.