How not to bake

I am RUBBISH at following recipes. I’m not sure why – I can read, I have a logical brain and I can follow instructions – but I just find it incredibly difficult to follow a recipe. I’m sure it’s partly that I’m much better at processing verbal information (audio-recipes anyone?) and partly because I don’t have a way of marking where I am, with the result that I read the same line over and over until I can’t be bothered any more and just make it up myself.

In everyday cooking, I can get away with this. It turns out that when baking, I can’t. On my rare attempts to bake over the years I have produced the following:

1) A giant biscuit – it turns out you can’t produce a feather-light sponge by mixing in the flour halfway through the baking time when you realise it’s still in the weighing scales and the cake’s in the oven.

2) A crunchy chocolate cake – apparently you can’t substitute granulated sugar when you don’t have any of the caster variety. To be fair it was delicious, just an odd texture.

3) (Today) Two dense halves of a Victoria ’sponge’. It seems that when a recipe says to add baking powder, it probably means it.

It is easier to get in than it is to get out

Well, here I am. A fully-fledged Dubliner, complete with PPS number, bank account, new phone and tax credits – all astonishingly painless to set up. Mind you, in a country where 739,000 of the 4.3m population are immigrants who arrived in the last 10 years, it’s perhaps unsurprising that they have their arrivals process down to a fine art.

What has been unexpectedly much harder is extricating myself from the UK – in particular my mobile phone contract. I started the process to end my contract two months ago; today after five phone calls and several thousand touch-tones choices I appear to be back, as they say, to square one.

Of course I understand why companies don’t want people to leave. But I don’t understand what they think they will gain by making it so incredibly difficult. I certainly haven’t emerged battered and bruised after my tussles with the (laughingly named) customer service department thinking: “Fair’s fair chaps, I tried my hardest but you won in the end. I now have a renewed respect for your tenacity and ability to hide the correct contact number on your website, only for me to then find out I need to write in to a postal address – brilliant! I think I’ll upgrade.”