It’s always nice to be able to relate to something. Today’s theory of relativity came in the shape of the latest post of one particular blog I like to visit: I Am Livid. I particularly enjoy this piece of online entertainment because, as anyone who knows me will attest to, I like a bit of a rant myself. Gimme a soap box and I’ll wow the folks at home with vitriol.

Anyway I digress. The author was understandably pissed off that instructions for cooking a jacket potato told him to preheat the oven to a spurious, and seemingly unconvertible, temperature in fahrenheit. Which is for Americans and being as how this is Britian, not much blinkin’ use.

I get what he means. The other weekend, I was cooking flapjacks. I did this once before, but I went freestyle and fucked it right up, so this time I thought I’d follow a proper recipe. So far, so good - until I got to the temperature bit.

“Preheat your oven to gas mark 5.”

Oh good then. So what please, Dear Recipe-Writer, is this in centigrade? Because gas mark 5 isn’t on my cooker. It probably hasn’t been written on one since about 1953. And to add to the confusion, my cooker is powered with gas, not electric. This was starting to make me cross. I just wanted flapjacks. I didn’t want to have to do mathematics, which I am very bad at.

So I’m truly baffled. But I’m also lazy and couldn’t be bothered to look on the internet to start converting gas mark 5 into something I could understand. I just got a bit more cross, had a guess (lick finger, stick in air, wind says go with 150C) and whacked the flapjacks in with a ‘Fuck it and see’ shrug of the shoulders.

Then because I was feeling a bit huffy still, I opened a bottle of wine to cheer myself up, forgot to set the timer and only remembered about the flapjacks two hours later. There’s nothing like decimated oats and raisins to make your Fairy Liquid bottle quiver with anticipation. And Christ on a bike, the smell. It was a cross between biscuity old ladies and burned toast. Thoughts of being a lifelong domestic failure weaved through my mind, but thankfully by this time, I was too sozzled to care.

At least I’ve learned a valuable lesson. In future, leave flapjack production to bakers and mathematicians…