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Advice

I am the world’s most prolific hander-out of unsolicited advice. All you need to do is ring me and mention that you’ve got a bit of a scratchy throat and I’m off: ‘Oh you must buy First Defence immediately,’ I will say. ‘It works retroactively, so just take it whenever – it shortens the life of your cold, you know. Alternatively put a raspberry leaf on your head. Drink hot water and honey. Eat/drink lemon. My advice is to take a few days off work. Go to bed as soon as you feel that tickle in the back of your throat, shut the curtains and sleep for 24 hours. It’s a miracle cure. Put your out of office on your email and then you can relax and get better. Paracetamol every 4 hours. Time it – put on an alarm. Every four hours. Honestly, it’s a miracle cure. Anyway do all of that and you’ll be better. Ring me in the morning. Nice talking to you, bye.’

And it’s not just health. Buying or selling houses: ‘Oh don’t wait for the market to do anything, buy when you need to and sell when you need to. People who try to play the market always get shafted.’ Boyfriends: ‘If he’s not dropping hints about marriage after 18 months, move on’. Families: ‘Oh, you can only have the relationship with your mother that you can have. Don’t idealise it and you’ll never be disappointed.’ Diets, pets, make-up, skincare, haircare – I’ve got an answer for everything and force it on everyone, unasked.

I’m trying not to, I swear to God. I wrote a thing once for a magazine about friendship and read a lot of stuff about how to be a good friend and how to be a good listener. And one of the top tips for being a good friend was to not hand out unsolicited advice. The other top tips, if you’re interested are:

 – Don’t interrupt.

 – Don’t garnish your friend’s story with a story about something similar that happened to you.

 – Don’t go ‘mm hmmm’ all the time.

 – Don’t finish people’s sentences.

I do ALL of these things, ALL the time. It’s a miracle I have any friends at all. Oh wait, I DON’T.

I don’t know why I have to hand out advice all the time; I must stop. And I’m almost always wrong. And don’t tell me that it comes from a place of love, because it doesn’t; it comes from a place of meddling. From a place that believes that if you’re not doing it my way, you’re not doing it the right way.

For example, I have to restrain myself from going round to my friend’s house with a bottle of Aveeno and some Eight Hour Cream for her boyfriend’s hands, which are very cracked from doing a lot of gardening. (I dispensed this miracle-cure recipe last weekend but I can tell it has not been acted on.)

And the temptation to ring up some friends of mine who are swapping their large-ish flat for a miniscule flat in London and a house in the countryside – (they’ve got two children! Who aren’t going to get any SMALLER) – in order to give them a jolly good lecture is, at times, overpowering.

The only thing I can console myself with is that I know that I do it and I know that it’s bad. I am trying to do a thing where I only hand out advice if someone specifically says ‘What do you think?’ Then I take a deep breath and talk non-stop for one hour. But no-one ever says that. No-one cares what you think they should do. They just want you to nod and smile and say ‘Oh, I am so sympathetic,’ and then tell a joke.

Which brings me to coffee and walnut cake. I was feeling a bit scatty today while I was making it and I used plain flour instead of self-raising flour. But rather than throwing the bowl against the wall and storming out into the garden to kick over some flower pots and then starting all over again, I sprinkled 1 teaspoon of baking powder over the mixture. And the cake came out better than, I think, any cake I’ve ever made.

So there we are: if you ever use plain flour instead of self-raising flour by mistake, sprinkle over 1 teaspoon of baking powder. Just don’t ring me up and say you’re not feeling well.

Coffee and Walnut Cake

Makes one small loaf – 7in x 4in

 119g butter

 119g sugar

 2 eggs (weigh these and then use the same amount of flour, sugar and butter. Mine weighed 119g.)

 119g flour

 1 tsp baking powder

 ½ tsp vanilla essence

 1 tbsp espresso powder dissolved in ¾ tbsp hot water

 50g walnuts, roughly chopped

1 Butter a loaf tin.

2 Beat the butter until it’s creamy and then beat in the sugar until pale and fluffy.

3 Then beat in one egg at a time. Mine curdled to buggery but it didn’t make any difference to the end result. You can in theory add one tablespoon of flour after each egg to stop it from doing this.

4 Fold in the flour. Stare at the recipe and then stare at your flour packet and scream ‘FUCK!!’ then reach for some …

5 Baking powder. Add 1 tsp, sieved, so there are no lumps and mix in. Add the vanilla essence, coffee and walnuts.

6 Pour into your cake tin and then bake at 180ºC for 30–35 mins or until the top is firm.