Oh bread.

Lovely, lovely bread. How I miss you.

Hot, buttery toast, with a slick layer of Marmite floating on the surface. Crusty hunks of sourdough, topped with curls of unsalted French butter. Pulled pork with ‘slaw and barbecue sauce in a big soft bap. Floaty white boats in a bowl of tomato soup. Chip butty with ketchup as a dirty treat when DorkyDad is away on a work trip. Wholemeal pitta, stuffed with cream cheese and avocado, and if I’m feeling fancy then some chopped up pepperoncini or za’atar sprinkled in among it.

Sandwiches too. Lord, I love me a sandwich.

I love the unfussy classics that remind me of childhood picnics. Ham and English mustard. Generous slabs of sharp cheddar with Branston pickle. BLTs, with the sometimes-controversial addition of brown sauce. Hotel lobby club sandwiches, with a generous side of plain crisps.

The first time I went round to DorkyDad’s flat, back in our early Edinburgh days, he cooked me his ‘perfect chicken sandwich’. He’d been hyping it up for months, saying it would be better than anything we could find in a restaurant. He wasn’t wrong. There were slices of perfectly moist chicken, perfectly crisp bacon and perfectly crunchy iceberg lettuce. They were artfully arranged between two halves of a perfectly toasted baguette, which was spread with the perfect smear of mayonnaise, and sprinkled with the perfect amount of pepper and salt. It was accompanied by a glass of perfectly chilled white wine.

It’s a sandwich so good that he once wrote a poem about it.

These days, love them though I do, my sandwich encounters are few and far between. Like just about every woman my age, gluten has decided that it’s no longer a friend. An occasional bite is okay – a delicate nibble every few days. But I can’t eat it as a daily thing, and certainly not stacked more than one meal in a row.

Nobody warns you that middle age is a long series of break-ups with things you love. First your ability to stay up until midnight. Then your knees. Then wine. Then, in my case, bread.

Every sandwich, cake, pastry, pasta dish now involves a complex mental computation about how many other sandwiches, cakes, pastries and pasta dishes have been consumed that week. A croissant at morning tea means no garlic bread with dinner. Pizza on Friday means no toast until Monday.

If I calculate incorrectly, and tip the scales too far in the wrong direction, I’ll end up lying awake that night: headache pounding, tummy gurgling, elbows and shins itching. And while I have gamely tried a wide variety of gluten free breads, I’m yet to find one that doesn’t taste like sadness. They all make the marmite clump, rather than glide.

So now instead, I snack on bananas and apples. Beetroot dip with tortilla chips. Rice cakes with cottage cheese. It is wheat-free muesli for breakfast, and scrambled eggs for lunch.

Which brings me to the torture of living in a house full of bread addicts. It turns out the passion for gluten is hereditary, and DorkySon has inherited it in full.

If I buy a Banjo’s baguette for DorkyDad – usually destined to become a roast beef wedge for lunch – there’s every chance that three quarters of it will disappear before it even reaches the bread bin. I will walk into the kitchen to find him absent-mindedly tearing off chunks and eating them plain, as though most of a fresh baguette is a perfectly reasonable snack.

And maybe it is. At seventeen, I would probably have done the same thing. There is something irresistible about good bread. The crack of the crust. The soft, chewy middle. The way one piece becomes another, and then another, until suddenly all that remains is a scattering of crumbs and the guilty realisation that someone else’s lunch has disappeared.

I watch him demolishing a baguette with a mixture of amusement and envy. Enjoy it while you can, kid. One day your body may also decide that bread is no longer a food group but an occasional indulgence, to be approached with caution and carefully calculated consequences.

Sometimes, when I’m making DorkyDad a roll for lunch, or DorkySon a bánh mì for dinner, I steal the tiniest corner. Just enough for a taste; to remind myself that bread and I once had something special.

I suppose this is simply what middle age is: accepting that some of your deepest loves must become occasional treats rather than everyday companions. I’m trying to make peace with that.

Even so.

At night, I dream of bread.

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Photo by Mike Kenneally on Unsplash