the madszine

From the ashes of a world thrown into chaos and fear rose an unexpected but familiar saviour of  stodgy yellow and brown. The sweet smell of bananas and baking bread filled the home like little capsules that humanity now existed inside. This comforting rectangular warrior surged against the anxiety of terms like ‘contamination’ and ‘air-born virus’ and came out the other side victorious. For yours truly this solitary confinement was not the shellshock that it was for my neighbours and peers.

I snugly solidified myself into my sofa with a book and grew. I had all the essentials around me, too conflicted over whether to wear my yellow or pink hair ribbons to be concerned with the idea of venturing out to fight the hoards around the toiler paper or sourdough bread. With time and pages turned my hair grew, and my younger self’s jeans became too short. Brown buzz cut became blonde shoulder length, rupi kaur became kafka, sunrise bus rides became sunset balcony meals, all time low became lana and sixteen became eighteen. Surrounded as I was in my own measurements of time and accomplishment it felt as if my adolescent had fallen away like leaves from the trees in autumn and my teenage aspirations lay rotted around my roots. From those carcasses sprouted a new life to envelop me brain, body and soul.

To me then came the golden light of a simple familiarity and pleasure so out of place in the world cold as it was it seemed angelical. Banana bread is the food of the isolated, of those whose call to re-enter society to fight at the feet of capitalism isn’t heard, to the lonely. As I grew and flowered into the now-adult version of my life I grasped back a life I’d lost to a structured day so long ago. Banana bread saw my last teenage years, rose as I had done in height in plentiful taste, absent in structure beyond warm rotundity. Poetry consumed on the tongue as an edible crumbling loaf, and not just poetry but history; the history of humanity etched in each thick layer. Clarity comes to me in simple ingredients mixed together in a bowl and warmed at 175© now just as easily as it did in the summer months of ’20.

2 medium bananas,
peeled 76g (1/3 cups) butter,
unsalted or salted,
melted 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
150g (3/4 cup) sugar,
75g of brown sugar,
75g of caster sugar
1 large egg, beaten
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
205g (1 1/2 cups) self-raising flour
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There is an art to creating something completely of your own hands may that be words on a page, paint on a canvas or flour and sugar in an oven. Banana bread, like my growth, contains the collective comfort that, no matter what happens in the world, there will always be an escape. Fleeing the harsh reality of the world to a land in the shape of a lumpy, homemade, delicacy that decorates your home with warm smells and heavenly tastes. I consider banana bread the ichor of gods that do not exist, the daylight in the darkness of the cloud, but I’m sure it would be contented to be what it is, a herald of the indominable human spirit.