Sacred Rivers With Simon Reeve

The first episode of this series was a beautiful and thought-provoking documentary about the River Nile. Starting at the source of the Blue Nile, Simon Reeve worked his way through Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt, exploring modern and ancient civilisations, their beliefs, religious and agricultural practices, seeing how technology is changing everything, and trying to solve the eternal battle "who owns the River Nile"?

Everyone outside of Africa tends to think it's an Egyptian river, as do the Egyptians, yet the Blue Nile's source is below a tin shed in a surprisingly lush and verdant Ethiopia, a country which contributes 80% of its water. Then the river flows on through Sudan, which houses the confluence of the Blue and White Nile (neither of which are particularly blue or white, but rather greeny brown). The confluence, near Khartoum, is described as "the longest kiss in history".

The source is sacred, and people make pilgrimages to benefit from its healing properties. But thereafter, the river has more practical uses. Egyptians have long made use of its waters to irrigate crops and provide power. But Ethiopia and Sudan have previously underused this resource, and now they want more of the action. Simon Reeve visits a vast dam-building project in Ethiopia. The Grand Renaissance dam will triple Ethiopia's electrical output, making them Africa's biggest supplier. And in Sudan, Reeve sees an irrigation project the size of 10,000 football pitches which grows alfafa to export to the Gulf. He also sees 2,500 Friesian cows kept in giant corrugated iron barns, which require cooling fans and mist sprays to reduce the ambient temperature by 20 degrees to a still whopping 30 degrees Celsius. The amount of water this requires is ridiculous. And if a thousand other farmers in Sudan decide to do the same - well, you get the picture.

These aren't the only animals he visits in strange circumstances. In a Nubian village, he sees a crocodile living in a cramped pit in a house. It was meant to be a tourist attraction, but now, thanks to political unrest in the region, the tourists are no longer coming. But the crocodile will stay trapped in its hole until it gets big enough for the family to kill it, stuff it and hang it on the wall. "It doesn't have a great future," remarks a visibly disturbed Reeve.

The Nubians have it tough. When the Egyptians wanted to dam the Nile at Aswan to create Lake Nasser in the 1960s, they not only relocated two colossal temples (Abu Simbel and Philae) by chopping them up into 40,000 pieces and then sticking them back together again - an extraordinary feat - but also forced a whole society to move. And unlike the temples, which were effectively just raised to a safe height above the water, the 100,000 Nubians had to travel miles away from the fertile shores of the river into the desert. The Nubians have a culture just as advanced and historic as the Egyptians - they worshipped the same gods, and built pyramids for their pharoahs. But in a hideous bout of racism, the Egyptians refused to believe that this black African society could be as advanced as their own.

Reeve experiences a diversity of religion along the river. He rows a papyrus raft across Lake Tana in Ethiopia to see the island monasteries. Christianity was imposed by missionaries here before the founding of the Holy Roman Empire. And Judaism was here before this. The ark of the covenant was believed to be here. Sudan marks the division between Muslim and Christian Africa, and here Simon Reeve sees an Islamic sunset ritual which he finds unexpectedly welcoming and inclusive after so many years of Sudanese news stories of civil war, human rights violations and genocide.

And then there are the Egyptian temples, carved with extraordinary images of deities and hieroglyphs thousands of years ago, while the rest of the world was seemingly in "intellectual darkness". The one at Philae is dedicated to the god of Isis. Now the fundamentalists of the misnamed modern-day Isis would tear down these idolatrous buildings. Which is partly why tourists are being scared off from visiting them. Egyptians today depend on the temples for a different reason - they need the income they generate. There is a huge security presence at the historical sites Reeve visits. He has armed bodyguards, demonstrating that the military is still very much in control, despite the recent revolution. The armed guards accompany him on his overnight train journey from Aswan to Cairo. Although he gets his own cabin and we had to make do with rickety reclining seats when we made the same journey in safer times (see below), the most annoying thing we had to contend with was a party of Australians wanting to, er, party. No one was pointing guns at us.

In Cairo, Reeve visits the original Nilometer, which was used to measure the height of the water to calculate how much farmers could be taxed for their crops. North of Cairo, the Nile splits into the tributaries of its Delta. Here the cotton we in the West like to put on our beds is grown, creating back-breaking work for the women. (Simon Reeve gives up his attempt to help them in seconds.) 2,500 litres of the Nile are required to grow enough cotton to make just one T-shirt. So what will happen to these people's livelihoods if the river waters are all used up in Ethiopia and Sudan? Who has more right to the sacred H2O? All these farmers are poor and deserving of a better life.

40% of the population of Egypt is illiterate. Whereas in the course of my privileged education, Egypt was the only word I learned to write at school that didn't contain any joined-up letters. Aged nine, my class at junior school did a project on Egypt, learning about pyramids, hieroglyphs, pharoahs and sphinxes, and I've held a fascination for the country ever since. I only got to go for real, however, about twenty-five years later. Even this trip was somewhat of an accident of fate. We were supposed to go on a belated honeymoon to Sri Lanka, but the Boxing Day tsunami happened the day before we were due to leave, so a cruise along the River Nile is where we ended up instead. Back at home, my mother was dying, and I spent most of the week with flu, coughing like a character out of Louisa May Alcott. But our first glimpse of the pyramids, shimmering on the distant horizon while we were hurtled from the airport to our hotel through Cairo's crazy traffic in the back of a black and white Yugo taxi that only had one door, was like a beacon of radiant light that offered a strange hope of survival against all the odds. The modern, choking city of Cairo has been built right up to the very edge of these ancient tetrahedra. They have stood for thousands of years, whereas the modern day high rises, seldom finished on the top storeys as a tax avoidance strategy, look like they will barely last a decade.

The age of everything ancient in Egypt is simply astonishing. It may sound incredibly naive to write this, but Simon Reeve made exactly the same comment. It's astonishing because everything is still in flawless condition, having been preserved by the desert sands for centuries. I stood inside a claustrophobic pyramid at Dahshur, where the air is stale, rank and oppressive, but it's humbling to think that that air was enclosed at least 4,000 years ago. It's astonishing too because of the technology involved in the building, and hauling of the granite stone up the River Nile from Aswan. Much of the treasure from the tombs in the Valley of the Kings had been looted long before they were rediscovered, but a tenacious and determined Howard Carter eventually stumbled across Tutankhamun's burial gifts, and the haul is now on display in the museum in Cairo. It is is indescribably beautiful. The museum generally looks like a fusty jumbled storeroom, but the bright gold and jewels of King Tut don't need any further artistry. Further round the museum, we came face to face with the mummified corpse of Ramses II, whose statue sat on a throne at the entrance to Abu Simbel. What the carved stonework didn't reveal was that he had ginger hair.

Our lucky tour group had an incredible guide who just knew everything there was to know about anything. He could read and translate hieroglyphs quicker than I could read a newspaper. The head of antiquities from the Boston MFA was leading a tour round Medinet Habu while we were there, and as soon as she saw our guide she raced over to him to introduce him to her group as "the greatest Egyptologist" she had ever met. So I am not kidding you. Shame I was coughing too much and too knackered from several 4am starts (these were the days long before children) to take it all in.

Cruising down the Nile was wonderful, and felt totally luxurious in comparison to the overnight train journeys to and from Cairo. Our boat was full of Italians, so pasta was continually on the menu, but as our guide book pointed out, "There are many reasons to visit Egypt. The food isn't one of them." Some people claimed they got a bit "templed out", but I loved them all, and it was fascinating to observe glimpses of traditional Egyptian life along the riverbanks as we floated past. The oxon pulling carts, the fisherman on their feluccas, the dusty stalls selling oranges and bananas, the washing of clothes, the call to prayer echoing across the Nile at sunset.

But it wasn't all easy. All first world problems, of course. There were those grotty train journeys. There was the constant pestering by people trying to sell you things. Simon Reeve can only say "As-salamu alaykum" in Arabic, but I found I needed to say "La shukran" (no thank you) a lot more than hello. "I've bought a pyramid", one of our group joked as he boarded our minibus at Giza. There were the stinking toilets, which we used to award marks out of ten. The worst were at the pyramids (negative numbers). The best were the ones at Abu Simbel (a good eight), which had plastic flowers and allowed you more than one piece of toilet paper for your baksheesh. After a dodgy buffet on our last evening in Aswan, my husband had to locate a toilet at very short notice in the Cairo Bazaar. (Coffee shop hole in the ground - a rough two.) The Egyptian pounds we were using were disintegrating and grubby, but there was no doubt the locals desperately needed us to spend them.

Pyramids looking towards downtown Cairo

Medinet Habu

Looking towards the Valley of the Kings near Luxor

View while waiting for our boat's slot to pass through the locks at Esna

Traditional fishing

Sunset at Kom Ombo

Kom Ombo temple

Nubian village, Aswan

Lake Nasser at Abu Simbel

Aswan

So who out of Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia has the greater right to the waters of the Nile? Simon Reeves' conclusion was that the nations involved need to be better at sharing, which just tells me that he has never tried to have that same conversation with a two year old child.

Play School

Here is a reverse to the norm - somewhere I travelled to made me reminisce about something I'd seen on television.

We were at Cartwright Hall in Lister Park in Bradford, at the "Sharing Stories With Julia Donaldson" exhibition. It was a glorious display for our fancy-dress loving daughter, with princess, ladybird, Gruffalo and witch costumes and a stage in the woods to perform on. There were lots of the original artwork for Donaldson's books by her collaborators Axel Scheffler, Lydia Monks, David Roberts and others. Julia Donaldson's notebooks of rough drafts were actually quite a relief to see, since the finished texts seem so effortlessly perfect that you feel she must rattle them off in five minutes, which isn't the case at all. On display were also several letter exchanges between author, artists and publishers requesting numerous changes to the drawings, which made you realise that each picture must have been worked over several dozen times before it was accepted. Just as well Axel Scheffler can't stop drawing - there were beautiful birthday cards and envelopes he had painted for Julia Donaldson, as well as a letter he had written in his native German to a friend saying how hopeless he thought his work was. Oh, the great tortured genius.

There was a giant Gruffalo hiding around a corner, which scared the bejeezuses out of our daughter.

Gruffalo selfie. My daughter has been known to claim that he looks a bit like me

Our daughter's favourite part of the exhibition was a replica of the Squash and a Squeeze house. Because we spent the majority of our time in this section, I was able to have a proper look at the displays roundabout. And I learned something. Even though the book wasn't published until 1993, the Squash And A Squeeze song was originally performed on Play School in 1978 by Derek Griffiths and Floella Benjamin. I always knew the book was originally a song, but I didn't realise the song was that old. Julia Donaldson received the princely sum of 18 pounds for it from the BBC. The song was even released on a Play School LP, which was on display in the exhibition. To my total surprise, it was a record that I owned as a child and listened to a lot. Humpty Dumpty, Jemima, Big Ted, Little Ted and Hamble were all on the cover. Yet I have never recognised the song in its modern-day guise, even though it has barely changed. In case you are curious, like everything, the Derek and Flo version is available on You Tube.

"Wise old man, won't you help me please?"

I grew up in a world without CBeebies, so for my generation, Play School was pretty much all we had when it came to a pre-schoolers' daily television slot. So it has a special place in our nostalgic hearts. Derek Griffiths and Floella Benjamin made an appearance in the "Christmas Past" scene of the CBeebies Christmas Carol last year, which was a lovely nod to us half-asleep grown-ups slumped on the sofa, even if our children didn't have a clue who they were or why they were there ("Make the old people go away, Mummy."). For what it's worth, they still look wonderful. Play School is a format which has survived well, however. You can see its influence on modern-day shows like Tikkabilla (which even has the same square, round and arched windows) and Show Me Show Me (which has a teddy bear and a ragdoll toy). But I genuinely had no idea until last week that the magnificent Julia Donaldson had played a small role in my childhood too. It's a strangely comforting thought. And now that Julia Donaldson has such a vast catalogue of books behind her, I hope my daughter will have a much longer-lasting memory of her wonderful work.

Downton Abbey (Part 2)

Bettys, that well-known Yorkshire tea-room institution, put in a bit of a cameo on Sunday's episode of Downton Abbey. Apparently. I didn't see it. Because I don't watch Downton Abbey any more. Not since they killed off Matthew. And it got silly. (Or too silly. It was always silly.)

Keeping with the theme of factual inaccuracy on Downton, Bettys' Facebook page (which I "like" in the eternal hope of free cake) was quick to point out two errors. One was to do with an apostrophe (the shop still had one in 1924), and the other was a basket of Fat Rascals in the window, which weren't made or sold or even heard of at the time. Though as Bettys actually supplied the said Fat Rascals, you can't blame Julian Fellowes for this one.

Here is a snapshot of a delicious Bettys pink champagne afternoon tea, consumed to celebrate my 40th birthday. Bettys may be expensive, but always worth the compulsory queue. The pastry on their Yorkshire curd tarts is sublime. The raspberry macaroons on the menu this summer were to die for. And the cafes are so much more child friendly than the posh pinnies could ever lead you to imagine. (There is evidence: my daughter is devouring her own slice of cake in the background.)

Downton Abbey

Oh, please someone, make it stop. Julian Fellowes, you may now be in the House of Lords, but you are never going to be a Lord of the Manor or have your own footman, so please, PLEASE, take your wish-fulfilment fantasies out of our lives and leave us all in peace. There, I've said it. Even though I haven't officially watched Downton Abbey since they killed off Matthew, I can't believe ITV is still milking it quite so pathetically. It was once reasonably entertaining, then it sank to mildly diverting, and now it's just got plain silly. I for one cannot wait until the property is either burned down by an angry tenant farmer, bombed to smithereens in the Second World War, or sold off to the National Trust.

I caught some of an episode on Sunday, purely by accident. I couldn't work my friend's Sky remote properly, right? And that's the story I'm sticking to. They made me do it, mister. Honest. This is Season Five. It is ten years since the start of Series One. However, nobody looks any older (although Lady Mary is now paler than a circus clown and skinnier than the proverbial rake). And nothing really has changed, apart from more characters having sex with people they shouldn't. The Earl of Grantham is still under the illusion that everybody in the village loves him, his family and his estate. Occasionally some firebrand socialist is allowed to shout at dinner, but Lord G still has the authority to throw them out. Even though 1920s dresses are surely much less fiddly than Edwardian gowns, the Crawleys still can't put their own clothes on or brush their own hair. Mrs Patmore has resisted every new-fangled kitchen gadget on the market, and still prepares dinner as though it is a banquet in a medieval castle, with the butlers doubling as jesters. Daisy is still only allowed to do the washing up. And for some reason (her acerbic one-liners being the only good thing in the script, probably), the Dowager Countess still hasn't died of old age.

There are ridiculous numbers of characters, split across upstairs and downstairs, and ridiculous numbers of subplots. But it is hardly going to be the great ensemble piece of Fellowes' Oscar-winning Gosford Park without the late, great Robert Altman at the helm. Downton's secrets are so obvious they are screaming out from the screen. Didn't anybody notice Lady Edith having a baby? Did the family raising it think the stork brought it? Is Alfred Hitchcock supposed to have named his most famous psychopath after a murderous butler? The linguistic and factual inaccuracies continue (unintentional pun) unabated: characters "get shafted" while driving cars yet to be designed past TV aerials, UPVC conservatories, double-yellow lines, and get home to listen to music that hasn't been composed yet. Fellowes would, though, apparently describe me as "socially insecure" for pointing out that he hasn't learned to Google things properly.

It's supposed to be set in Yorkshire, as characters regularly wander off to Easingwold, Ripon and the Ainsty Hunt, but it isn't filmed anywhere near. Julian Fellowes clearly has bad memories of his schooldays at Ampleforth so won't venture north of Oxford. Apparently he wanted Gosford Park to be filmed at Highclere and wasn't allowed, so he stamped his foot and demanded it was used for Downton instead. But the servants are at least all made to speak with the official television Bad. Generic. Northern. Accent. Which is just as well as otherwise, from the scenery and weather in the background, you'd never guess they were meant to be in Yorkshire at all.

This is a genuine Yorkshire stately home,
but ironically it's been rather overused for Evelyn Waugh novels set in Wiltshire

Now, unlike the Crawleys, I properly live in Yorkshire, although my estate is a somewhat more modest one. But thanks to National Trust and Historic Houses membership, I get to nose round Yorkshire's castles and manor houses on a regular basis. Being perpetually in the company of a four-year-old child, I am especially familiar with their adventure playgrounds, hide-and-seek topiaries, cafes, miniature railways, fountains, ice-cream vans, opportunities to see Santa and summer exhibitions of Axel Scheffler drawings. As far as I am aware, Downton Abbey doesn't have any of these. Yet.

Newby Hall near Ripon,
 which Tour de France sports commentators claimed was Castle Howard

As for travelling anywhere near the world of Downton Abbey, I once stood next to Dan Stevens (who played Matthew) at the W7 bus stop outside Hornsey Town Hall in Crouch End. I have walked past the Peter Pan statue in Hyde Park, where Lady Mary dumped her latest beau on Sunday night, numerous times. I have nearly fallen (but not been pushed) under a bus in Piccadilly Circus (bad wine at an office Christmas party). And from now on, that's as near as I will care to go. Please, someone, make Julian Fellowes stop. Not in a murderous Bates kind of way. Just take his pen and his ITV contract away.

Nunnington Hall, near Helmsley.
Cheeky peacocks and miniature rooms.

Grantchester

"It was drowsily warm,
with dozens of bees
lazily buzzing
through flowers and trees..."
(Lynley Dodd, Hairy Maclary and Zachary Quack)

Cambridge's answer to Endeavour Morse is apparently a ginger-haired vicar called Sidney, although he has ended up being an amateur sleuth by accident. Grantchester is adapted from a set of novels by James Runcie. James is the son of Robert, who was of course Archbishop of Canterbury and who - more importantly - used to have a parish in Cambridge. While Robert (if I may refer to the Archbishop in such familiar terms) never ended up fighting crime on the banks of the Cam, James nonetheless drew some of Sidney's character traits and background story from his father's life.

So it's a shame the telly programme's a bit rubbish really. The sets and costumes may be an accurate representation of the 1950s, but the language is straight out of the noughties, and it's all a bit racy for post-wartime Britain. "Are you a virgin?" Sidney is asked over dinner by an overly confident female psychologist, who seems rather ahead of her time. "Is that why you drink?" she continues. It's true that Sidney does knock back quite a lot. It's something to do with the war, and doomed, frustrated love, but a virgin, he says, he most definitely is not.

Then (because you can't have an Oxbridge murder mystery without a Geordie copper) Robson Green turned up, and I actually groaned out loud. In last night's episode, his extreme fishing involved retrieving a corpse resembling Millais' Ophelia from a canal. Since Sidney knew the family involved (he'd had dinner with them the night before), DI or whatever he is Robson then let him do the rest of the work, the lazy bastard. Sidney ended up scrabbling under sofas and breaking and entering into rooms at King's College, which is hardly fitting for a man of the cloth. King's Parade seems to be our one token shot of Cambridge, since most of the series is filmed in Hertfordshire. Though the church in Grantchester is the real one.

Sidney, lacking a wife, is looked after by Raquel from Only Fools And Horses, She makes a fruitcake bribe for the archdeacon so that he will let them employ a very camp curate. I had a sudden flashback to Mrs Doyle offering cupcakes with "cocaine in them" to Father Ted. Mrs Maguire pines horribly for her "Ronnie", killed in the war. She has a keen eye for a "criminal brow" and makes the camp curate shave off his pencil moustache.

Anyway, it's all resolved quick as you like. It wasn't - as everyone believed - Johnny Johnson, the "jazz fellow" with a past, but rather the overconfident female psychologist, who had been having an affair with Ophelia's husband. There was blood on the stairs. It all ended in a dance, and Sidney quoting Corinthians.

Grantchester's most famous modern resident (when he's not in prison) is Jeffrey Archer, but don't let that put you off. The village is a pleasant stroll or ambitious punt along the river from the centre of Cambridge, and is worth visiting for its wonderful tea garden, the Orchard. The house that owns the garden once belonged to Rupert Brooke, a much better writer than Jeffrey Archer could ever be. I've only been the once to the Orchard, but have nearly made it twice more, thwarted on each occasion by the weather suddenly turning nasty and the garden closing early. There could be nothing nicer on a sunny day than slumbering in a deckchair under its blossom trees, reading a book, sipping tea or fruit cordial and sampling heavenly traditional sponge cakes. Sydney would prefer a sherry though. Just watch out for the wasps.

On Meth Cooking and Madison Avenue

With only The Great British Bake-Off and Our Zoo catching my attention of late, I have been busying myself with a couple of box sets which had finally been shipped out to us by Lovefilm after a few years of waiting: the first season of Breaking Bad and the third of Mad Men.

Breaking Bad was as wonderful as everyone claims - it had us gripped from the first moment, a crazy, nude-apart-from-a-respirator campervan chase across the New Mexico desert. Brilliant scientist Walter White, who has begrudgingly ended up a dull Chemistry teacher in an indifferent high school, is diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, despite never having smoked a cigarette in his life. Somehow he has to afford the medical treatment his family (a pregnant wife and partially disabled son) insist he try, even though it is likely to fail. And he needs to be able to leave them a financial legacy for when it does. Walter is too proud to accept a hand-out from a wealthy friend and one-time academic associate (who seems to have made his money from one of Walter's brainwaves anyway). So Walter begins cooking meth, therewith entering a seedy criminal underworld for which he has not even a smidgeon of the wherewithal required to succeed. And yet... Time after time, his scientific knowledge saves the day. His meth is the best on the market. His weaponry is an arsenal of chemical explosions and lethal gas clouds. He knows how to dissolve a body in acid, even if his dippy high-school dropout assistant doesn't listen to his instructions. Walter's moral code is painfully considered and unconventional. He proves you can be a good guy in the guise of a bad guy. And he can get away with stuff simply because to the world (and his Drug Enforcement Officer brother-in-law) he is still that dull Chemistry teacher. You can't help but love him, and I sincerely hope it's not another few years before we get sent Season Two.

I have never been to New Mexico, and (funnily enough) I have never cooked meth. I was the one cowering at the back of Chemistry lessons, too scared to even light my own Bunsen burner. Caravans are where we spend cheap family holidays, and they are usually reserved for huddling under blankets, reading Julia Donaldson, and playing endless games of Shopping List. The only thing ever cooking is a pan of pasta on the gas stove.

A caravan in a very drug free (unless Calpol counts) corner of Holland

I have however watched a parent die of cancer, and the whole backdrop to Breaking Bad makes me so thankful that my mother's treatment - thousands and thousands of pounds' worth of ultimately unsuccessful hormone-blocking medication and chemo and radiotherapy - was entirely funded by our National Health Service, leaving our family savings intact.

***********

We watched the second season of Mad Men while on holiday in Nice, as some evenings were wet and cold enough to make use of our apartment's DVD player. Our visit to the French Riviera was very much the sort of holiday that pre-dated our daughter's arrival - lingering over long lunches washed down with Provencal rose, exploring galleries of Matisse, Miro and Chagall, lying still on a beach for hours, and buying pungent cheese from local markets. It seems like a lifetime ago.

And thanks to the five years that had lapsed between seeing Seasons Two and Three, I was a little hazy as to what had been going on. But it wasn't long before the various takeover transactions, sexual obsessions and murky behaviour came back to me, and the third season was - as ever - a delightful watch. At first, not much seemed to happen other than the usual vast amounts of smoking and drinking in offices and kitchens, and me wishing I looked as good in a dress as Christina Hendricks. There was a new British contingent in the office, but otherwise, same old, same old, and nothing wrong with that. But suddenly several slow-burning plotlines unfolded to a significant finale, when long-suffering Betty Draper finally showed her philandering and mysterious husband Don the door, and the ad men of Madison Avenue had to steal their way out of soon-to-be sold down the river Sterling Cooper to set up the new, hopefully upriver Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, operating out of a hotel suite. The tipping point for these events was the Kennedy assassination. Everyone remembers where they were when they heard that news. Unless, like me, you weren't born yet. My generation remember where they were when they found out Diana died instead.

But it's not really about the plot on Mad Men. It's the comments on society that fascinate me. The treatment of women, both at work and home: no divorce rights, the expectation that you stop work as soon as you get married, let alone have your first child, and the assumption that if you are appointed to a position that is something other than secretarial, you will fill it for less pay and have most of your suggestions ignored. The treatment of men during childbirth, banished to the hospital waiting room. The treatment of women during childbirth, for that matter: sent comatose by medication while flat on their backs, with their doctor armed with forceps. The racism, covert and overt: you have a African American maid, and while she may be paid and you tut a little when horrific events unfurl in Alabama, it's quite possible that it's "just not the right time" for the Civil Rights Movement. The attitudes towards disability: a leading light in the company gets his foot severed in a stupid workplace accident and is instantly written off as never being able to work again, whereas now he would sue the company's ass off and they would at the very least be obliged to make the office wheelchair accessible. The closet, frustrated nature of homosexuality. The lack of connection between smoking and lung cancer, or risks during pregnancy. Lucky Strike is Sterling Cooper's biggest client, whereas nowadays you wouldn't even be allowed to advertise tobacco products.

So today, yes, in Britain, women may succeed in advertising (though not necessarily at equal pay to their male counterparts), and there is no sitting around all day drinking on sofas - or at least not on the office sofas. And all smoking will be done outside on the street. But there is so much competition between clients and colleagues that the stress levels are probably enormous. I had a housemate in London who had a job in advertising, and she loathed it so much that she would vomit every single morning before she set off to work, unable to deal with the pressure to create copy to ridiculous deadlines and keep up with her zany, quirky contemporaries, who were all baying for her job.

Did I walk down Madison Avenue in New York in the autumn of 2002, my only ever visit to the city, another trip that feels a lifetime away? Well, I must have done, because the Whitney Museum of American Art is situated on a corner of it, and we spent a whole afternoon there. The Whitney exhibits art that would have been utterly contemporary at the time of Mad Men, Andy Warhol in particular. Plus a vast collection of Jackson Pollock and Edward Hopper paintings, all housed in a giant concrete cube. A wonderful place. But there was no sign of Don, Roger, Pete, Peggy or Joan on the street outside. Nowadays, the advertising agencies synonymous with Madison Avenue have largely moved out, just like the newspapers on Fleet Street in London. As Bob Dylan would sing only a month after the close of Mad Men's Season Three: the times, they are a-changin'.

The Great British Bake-Off

I've been desperately clutching at straws to find an excuse to write about The Great British Bake-Off because, well, it's really all I'm watching at the moment. I love it. I am obsessed by it. And I know I am not alone. I wake up every Wednesday morning already excited about that evening's episode. (I'm sorry, but I have a young child and I take life's small pleasures whenever I can.) Usually, I want to eat everything they make (apart from the lavender meringue), though rarely believe I could attempt anything remotely similar. Nonetheless, I suck up all of Mary Berry's careful baking advice. And I have learned not to let Paul Hollywood's smugness wind me up any more. And while Mel and Sue's banter is getting ever more ridiculous, it's still making me snigger. As does Jo Brand's Extra Slice on a Friday night.

I don't think this sort of thing is allowed

But The Great British Bake-Off didn't really fit in with the required "travel memory" aspect of my blog. For starters, this series the tent has unhelpfully moved location to Welford Park in Berkshire. I have been on a few visits to Berkshire - and while these were generally confined to the M4 or the First Great Western railway, they include six to Windsor and Eton, two to Reading, and even one to Slough, but none to anywhere near Welford Park.

But my grandmother in Grasmere did once make us a Baked Alaska. I remember the day-long build-up to it being much more exciting than the end product. And not long ago, my friend Clare made Ryan's famous Key Lime Pie for Sunday lunch, and it was indeed as divine as Paul and Mary had claimed. But these links were all rather tenuous.

Then finally, last night during European Cakes Week, Sue got drunk on cake in South Jutland, Denmark and I thought, "I did that once at an 18th birthday party" (though the drunkenness in my case was all barbed-wire schnaps and not cake), and I was good to go.

So where were we last night? Bereft of Norman's dourness, we have been left with a mighty six of baking ingenuity: Luis, lovable Manc who always makes simply beautiful food. Martha, who has been on far too many skiing holidays for someone her age and is obviously at some sort of Swiss finishing school run by Betty's of Harrogate. Chetna, who has an annoying manner with a kitchen timer. Nancy, who is as down to earth as they come and dismisses Paul as "the male judge". Richard, who with his pencil still behind his ear is starting to show more typical British builder traits of unreliability. And finally Kate, last week's star baker, with her perfect curls and dreamy air. My husband said right at the start that none of them would be going home.

And what would "the male judge" say about this?

This week, everybody seems to be talking about winging it, even Martha, who is busy revising for exams. Nancy talks about her relevant experience and training - "I've had lots of European holidays, and I've probably eaten lots of cake, but not thought about how they're made or what they're called." Mel and Sue are simply talking in dodgy accents.

First up is a yeast-leavened cake. Lots of gigantic zig-zaggy tins are wielded. Mel says one looks like a piles cushion. German dialectal variation or just badly consistent spelling is in evidence in cake name captions. Nancy decides to bypass Europe entirely and go with a Caribbean theme somewhere along the lines of a Del Boy in Peckham pina colada. Kate is making an Israeli inspired cake, which she thinks is allowed because Israel takes part in Eurovision.

Then the technical challenge. Mary Berry's Swedish Princess Cake. It looks amazing. There is jam, creme patissiere, whipped cream, genoese sponge, more whipped cream, green marzipan, chocolate piping and a dainty rose on top. Thankfully, I've learned today that they serve them in the IKEA cafe, so I will be off to Batley shortly to buy one.

Then the showstopper, a Hungarian dobos torte, which involved dozens of stripey layers of sponge and ganache and ridiculous amounts of caramel artwork on top. Or that is the remit, anyway. Martha uses a mould to make chess pieces. Mary tuts. And Kate, because she felt that a two tiered cake looked too much "like a hat", decides to make an extra tier, which means she only has time to caramelise a few pistachios, which just simply isn't good enough, apparently. Whereas Richard's "bird", cut in inch-thick crude-cut toffee, gives him plenty of caramel, but looks like I'd made it. Meanwhile, Chetna is busy caramelising grapes. And masterful Luis makes a Hungarian style castle cage on a hill and still has about 20 minutes left to spare at the finish. He is shown calmly wiping down his work surface while all frantic hell breaks loose around him. "It's spectacular. It's what I call a showstopper," says Mary about the end result. Too right. "Sorry about destroying it," says Paul, merrily carving straight through with a giant knife.

There is no doubt that Kate and Richard have ballsed up. Richard's is the second cake of the day to be described as "sad". But Mary and the male judge can't decide which of Richard and Kate has ballsed up more. When really they can both be brilliant. I had hoped to see previously unseen footage of this heated debate on An Extra Slice on Friday night. But there was none. Maybe the battle was just too bloody. In any case, all six contestants get to live another day. A pasty day. David Cameron will be excited. Chetna's caramelised grapes leave her crowned star baker, even if she did commit the crime of making a Victoria rather than a Genoese sponge for her showstopper. Which must be up there with a soggy bottom, surely?

The cakes I gorged that day all those years ago in Denmark still linger in my memory. One involved layers of raspberry mousse between delicate slices of sponge, with little Danish flags on top. The other was small rectangles of perfect coconut sponge and with a sticky caramel topping.  So a good hint of the challenges on last night's Bake Off in both. And both absolutely ruined by those shots of Aalborg Akvavit.