Ian Hopkinson

Author's posts

Apr 08 2025

Book review: Brilliant Bread by James Morton

This is the first time I’ve reviewed a book on bakery, or any other sort of cooking. My review is of Brilliant Bread by James Morton.

I was recommended this book by a friend, I like it because it explains why you are doing what you are doing from the point of view of a scientist (Morton trained as a doctor). So, for example, I always assumed that to get a good crust you needed to bake absolutely as hot as you could but in fact to get a good crust you bake slightly cooler for longer which allows for a thicker, crunchier crust to form. I also learnt to wet my fingers before coaxing dough in a bowl, and not to over-flour my kneading surface.

Morton is explicit that he is writing as an enthusiastic amateur rather than a professional. He argues professionals are likely adapting recipes “down” to work in a domestic kitchen. Morton is a runner-up for the Great British Bake Off, so he is somewhat more than an amateur. His writing is relaxed, and readable. In places his extreme youth shines through which I found endearing.

The book is comprised of 11 chapters, three of which are on techniques (kneading/proving and sourdough starters) and basic materials and equipment. Breadmaking requires remarkably little in the way of equipment, this is where Morton’s recent life as a baking student comes into play. He recommends scavenging in skips for baking stones (only suggesting it is best not to use asbestos!). I did a little better than this, scavenging a limestone floor tile as a baking stone from my own garage. A dough scraper is the only essential he mentions; these cost little more than pennies but are definitely worth having. I made much less mess once I started working with a dough scraper. It turns out I had a suitable sharp blade to cut my dough before baking. I am hankering for a cast-iron Dutch oven though. He is similarly relaxed on ingredients, recommending in most cases that you get the cheapest available.

Morton is a big fan of bread making being being quick and easy to fit in around life (principally by pausing things by putting dough in the fridge) and by using no-knead techniques where kneading to develop the gluten network is replaced with just waiting. I quite enjoy kneading, and it seems to work rather better than waiting. I feel delaying proving in the fridge needs a bit of practice, I suspect I need to allow the dough to warm up fully when it comes out of the fridge.

Sourdough has a technique chapter of its own, and rather dominates the second half of the book. Sourdough is bread that is risen using a homemade yeast concoction (a starter). I must admit to being slightly wary of this. It has the air of Tamagotchi for middle-class people who will bang on endlessly about their starter. I think this came out of the early COVID pandemic period where bread flour and yeast were in short supply. My views are probably coloured by a possible intolerance to sourdough (or rather histamines) as a result of long COVID. Anyway, I will probably keep a sourdough starter as a pet for at least a little bit.

The remaining eight chapters are sets of related recipes: basic breads, breads to impress, breads with bits, advanced yeasted breads, sour, doughs to enrich your life, laminated doughs and nearly breads. The “breads to impress” tend to be those of a different form such as fougasse, bagels, pizza, and naan which have some variations in their process from basic breads. Also included in this chapter is “revival bread” which includes left over bits of bread, I’m not entirely sure why you would do this! Advanced yeasted breads are the trickier ones which use wetter, harder to handle doughs and add sourdough starter as a flavour rather than a raising agent. The “nearly breads” range from tortilla and bannock (similar to Irish soda bread) to outright cake (muffins and banana bread).

At the moment I am working my way through the recipes in the book from the start (I’m making a wholemeal loaf as I write). I feel Brilliant Bread has given me the tools to see where I’ve gone wrong and to improve. On my second attempt at the basic white bread recipe I won the accolade of “Best home-made bread I’ve ever tasted” from my wife, so I’d say I’m happy to recommend this book!

Mar 27 2025

Book review: When the Naughty Step Makes Things Worse by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker

Another book in the parenting thread: When the Naughty Step Makes Things Worse by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker.

The title describes the central theme of the book; some children simply don’t respond to the widespread, traditional punishment / reward method of parenting. If you try to put them on the Naughty Step they will refuse to go, and get ever angrier about it. As the authors highlight a motivated child has a higher stamina for opposing your parenting strategies than you have for executing them! You will typically have other things to worry about; a child can fully commit their energies to opposition.

They describe these children as “pressure sensitive” – they are made anxious when they feel under pressure to do something and their behaviour arises from this – finding ways to avoid the thing, elsewhere this is given a diagnosis of “pathological demand avoidance” (PDA). Their answer to pressure sensitive children is “low demand” parenting with the aim of widening the child’s “window of tolerance” for demands over a long period.

Fisher talks about how parenting was “invented” in the 1950s with the work of Baumrind and their demandingness/responsiveness model. It extends behaviourism, which sees animals trained by a combination of reinforcement (reward) and punishment, to the training (raising) of children with the addition of responsiveness which is trying to meet the needs of the child and being emotionally warm with them.

I sometimes wonder what fraction of animals refuse to be trained under the behaviourism model. When I reviewed Other Minds (all about octopuses) I read about efforts to measure the intelligence of three octopuses:

… two octopuses in their study put in some effort to carry out the tests presented whilst Charles insisted on squirting water at the experimenters and being otherwise uncooperative. It does make you wonder whether measures of animal intelligence are more a combination of willingness and intelligence. 

The authors refer to behaviourism models of parenting, somewhat tongue in cheek, as Good Parenting(TM). It is relevant to highlight the contrast because much of the internal battle for a low demand parent is the opinions of others, and whether they are right: are we here because we are poor parents? what does my parenting look like to other people? What are people thinking? Largely the author’s prescription is to ignore these outsiders except where necessary (other family members and professionals with important roles).

Thinking about pressure sensitive children it is easy to see how they struggle at school where systems of punishment and reward are becoming ever harsher. Furthermore in a classroom environment there is little scope for responsiveness. Therefore schools end up being strictly authoritarian environments which absolutely don’t work for a fraction of children, and greatly stress a further proportion. My experience of schools is that they have little appreciation or understanding of the existence of pressure sensitive children. Many of the children mentioned in the book have been pushed out of the mainstream school system, some are in special schools or home education.

After the preamble chapters talking about the group of children in question, and earlier models of parenting, The authors spend several chapters talking about different aspects of low demand parenting in practice, communication, behaviours, emotions, and screens. They are pretty positive about screens – highlighting that games like Minecraft offer pressure sensitive children a complex world which they control completely and often it is the only thing they will engage in. Most of the practices of low demand parenting are captured in acronyms – REACH, FLASH, JOIN UP. The core is to throw away your previous concepts of Good Parenting(TM) and seek a more equal relationship with your child (rather than trying to force them into conformance), join them with what they are interested in (for a while my wife and I played Fornite with our son), and focus on the necessary (sitting at the table eating healthy homecooked meals without your elbows on the table may be an ideal but sitting in front of the TV eating beige food is actually fine).

It is a bit difficult to judge the age group this book targets, much of the start feels like a discussion of younger children – at primary school and earlier but there are frequent mentions of children going into adolescence. One of the stories in the final chapter tracks that of my now 13 year old son almost exactly – apparently fine and doing very well in school until the demands of secondary school were overwhelming with an exit into online school.

There is a chapter on self-care for parents, a subject touched on earlier in the book in coping with the disapproving looks of other parents. This chapter uses techniques like radical acceptance, visualisation and mantras which I’m familiar with from counselling.

Despite being over 400 pages long When the Naughty Step… is an easy read. The text is broken up with Fricker’s cartoons, personal stories and various tables and exercises. Each chapter ends with a dialogue between Fisher and Fricker (which I found really useful), a bullet point summary and some suggestions for further reading.

I sometimes worry I have joined the cult of Fisher / Fricker, in common with many parents whose children have not been entirely straightforward to raise, I will enthusiastically recommend their books (and webinars). I think the core of their success is that they identify very clearly how our children are, when few others do, and reassure us that it is not the end of the world, when most are trying to convince us it is.

Mar 19 2025

Book review: Africa is not a country by Dipo Faloyin

My next review is of Africa is not a Country: Breaking stereotypes of modern Africa by Dipo Faloyin. It follows a thread of books I have read on Africa and Black people in the UK and elsewhere, this was prompted by the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020.

Africa is not a country is about viewing Africa from an African perspective. It is comprised of 8 parts, the first of which is a thumbnail sketch of the author, and his family, and where he grew up in Lagos. Faloyin is Nigerian with part Yoruba and part Igbo background although he was born in Chicago and now lives in London. He paints a vivid picture of his upbringing very unlike my own, mainly because his family is clearly very sociable and loves cities (or at least Lagos).

The second part goes on to talk about how the 54 countries of Africa came into being, starting with the Berlin Conference in 1884, in which the Western powers agreed to divide up Africa; no Africans participated, despite requests. One thing that struck me was that outside the conference politicians as senior as Gladstone in the UK knew that what they were doing was wrong. The US refused to sign the General Act of the conference, despite being participants. It isn’t clear whether this was a decision made on moral grounds. The 54 countries is something I think I will return to as a number, for comparison Europe has 44 countries, half the number of people and a third of the land area so we might expect Africa to be rather more diverse than Europe.

As a British European I don’t like to dwell too long on the colonial period. This part of the book highlights the preference of the British to out-source the colonisation problem to private companies, in particular the Royal Niger Company, which was taken over by Unilever (a former employer of mine) in the 1920s and only ended its existence in 1987. King Leopold II of Belgium’s subjugation of the Congo (essentially for his own personal gain) is spine-chilling – over the 20 years after the Berlin conference half the population, 10 million people were killed.

The division of Africa into arbitrary countries that did not follow ethnic or any other native pattern had consequences in the post-colonial period; the countries created at independence were naturally unstable so conflict was inevitable. However, the African consensus is that it is best to stick with these countries rather than attempt a wholesale reorganisation. This is not a peculiarly African problem, we can think about the fighting as Yugoslavia fell apart, and the Soviet Union, and the secessionist movements in Spain or Irish reunification.

Many of my early memories of Africa represented in the UK were of Band Aid, and the Ethiopian famine (1983-5). Faloyin sees this as the birth of modern white saviour imagery (I don’t disagree with him). Band Aid projected an image for all of Africa of famine and misery whose inhabitants could only be saved by the intervention of white Westerners – this theme has been repeated endlessly since then. It feels like things are changing though, for the 30th anniversary of Band Aid in 2014 there was a pretty large backlash with musicians with African backgrounds refusing take part. Of the leaders of the Aid/Relief movement Bob Geldof, for his part, essentially said the means justified the ends whilst Lenny Henry was more reflective on the appropriateness of the “white saviour” narrative.

The theme of representation gets a reprise in a later part of the book where Faloyin talks about representations of Africa in the movies which are usually highly stereotypical. This chapter is genuinely laugh out loud funny, as the author says it is a pastiche of Binyavanga Wainaina’s “How to write about Africa“. I hadn’t appreciated quite how revolutionary the film, Black Panther, was in terms of it’s representation of Africans. Actors in Black Panther did not act as generic Africans, they took on national or region speech and habits. Somewhat to my surprise Faloyin cites Coming to America as an earlier film in the same vein – sadly from Hollywood this appears to represent the full list of African films.

Faloyin talks about the story of post-independence democracy in seven types of dictatorship: cold war dealmakers, god-playing colonial masters, revolutionary heroes, opportunistic families, civil-war peacemakers, founding fathers and (rarely) unhinged madman with taste for human flesh. He does this through brief sketches of 7 post-independence leaders Siad Barre, Sani Abacha, Robert Mugabe, Paul Kagame, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, Obiang Nguena Mbasogo, and Muammar Gaddafi. Some of these dictators have fallen, but others and others like them remain in place. All of them have been supported to some degree by the West or the Soviet Union – sometimes both!

The chapter on looting is perhaps the most shameful for a British European since it is ongoing; the “Scramble for African” in the 19th century is beyond our reach – it happened in at least our great-great grandparents time. But in terms of looted artefacts it is my generation, people like me, in museums in my country who hold a tight grip on the artefacts taken (violently) by British forces during the Scramble with little obvious will to return them. Much of this discussion is based on the Benin Bronzes, these were not just taken, the sophisticated cities that held them were destroyed. Faloyin states that 90% of Africa’s cultural artefacts are now outside of Africa but of the 900 or so Benin Bronzes held by the British Museum, 800 or so are in storage. When Benin Bronzes went on (loaned) display in Cotonou, capital of Benin 275,000 people went to see them.

France, Germany, and Belgium were also heavily involved in looting artefacts – the Germans seem to have a particular enthusiasm for human remains which fed into their race science research.

It is fair to say there has been some progress on the return of artefacts to Africa but mainly in writing reports, with minor organisations returning a few artefacts with great fanfare, and foot dragging. Faloyin estimates that the number of artefacts under discussion for return is around 10% of the total.

Jollof, a rice dish from West Africa is a bit of a recurring theme through the book, clearly of critical importance to West Africans, and the author, but perhaps included for relief from some of the more serious chapters.

The book finishes with some vignettes with modern Africa, through protests in several countries, culture and the story of Botswana who fortunately discovered their diamond deposits after independence from the British and has thrived as a country since. Faloyin is optimistic about the future, he sees a young continent with a lot of positive things going on and perhaps signs of the end of the post-independence conflicts.

Jan 29 2025

Game Review: Black Myth Wukong

In a break from usual service I am reviewing a “computer game”, Black Myth Wukong by Game Science Interactive Technology. I started gaming in the early eighties when I was an early teenager, I think there was a bit of a break when I went to university then I continued into my early thirties (around 2000). There was then a pause until a while after my son was born, we got a PlayStation 5 in Christmas 2021 “for him”.

Since then my favourite games have been Horizon Zero Dawn, Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring, Lies of P and Ghost of Tsushima. I bought Black Myth Wukong with my Christmas money – a child once again! In common with my other favourite games it falls into the category of “action role-playing” game.

Black Myth Wukong is based on Journey to the West, a 16th century Chinese novel which I know from an eighties TV series which I remember by its short name “Monkey”. In the game you play the part of “the Destined One” (a monkey) whose task is to retrieve the six relics of Sun Wukong.

The action takes place over 6 chapters, it is closest in style to Lies of P, that’s to say the chapters involve a roughly linear path with battles with minor characters who respawn and bosses who you must defeat to progress. Defeating a character brings rewards, “will” which is the unit of progress used to upgrade your character and buy upgrades and consumables and also items. Fighting is action rather than turn based. Your weapons are a trusty staff (which can be replaced and upgraded through the games), and various spells which fall into several categories: active spells, defensive spells, transformations, spirits, vessels. There’s a huge range of spells and so forth to choose from. My favourite is “Pluck of Many” which summons a posse of replica monkeys to fight for you (but only for a brief period).

Black Myth uses the traditional trifecta of health, stamina and some consumable spell substance (Mana in this case) to indicate your current status. A couple of vessels and spirits are tied to a second mystical substance, Qi and spells have a cooldown period so you have to wait to use them again. Health is recovered by drinking from your gourd which contain a variety of upgradable drinks and “soaks” which have various effects. I think it’s best to think of the “soaks” as teabags! You can also collect a variety of modifying relics which can be equipped to boost various characteristics.

I liked the upgrade and progress mechanics, there are extensive skill trees but you can re-allocate “sparks” freely at the save points (shrines). Dying does not lose your accumulated will, which is an irritating feature of Elden Ring and similar. I have died futilely so many times in Elden Ring attempting to retrieve my accumulated experience points.

The graphics in Black Myth are stunning, a step above even Elden Ring and Lies of P which are excellent. This will be down, in part, to Unreal Engine 5. The chapters also have quite different visual styles – the first chapter, set on Black Wind Mountain is lush forest, the second Yellow Wind Ridge is scorched desert, the third the New West is snowy mountains, the fourth The Webbed Hollow is a creepy, cavernous underground environment, the fifth Flaming Mountains is a scorched volcanic moonscape, the final chapter Mount Huaguo is a mountainous, forested open world. In addition there are a couple of “secret” areas which are accessed by completing quest lines. The gameplay also varies a bit with chapter with some chapters like Yellow Wind Ridge and The Web Hollow feeling close to open world.

Your enemies are well-designed and have a very wide range of attacks, your own spells are very varied and both are rendered beautifully. I found the dodging animations particularly satisfying. I thought the in-game dialogue and interactions with characters was pretty good. Games Science is a Chinese studio and were a couple of places where translation seemed slightly odd (I’m thinking of the “non-white” and “non-able” bosses).

There is no difficulty level selection, so if you are struggling with a boss to progress then you have to “git gud” which is sometimes a pain. I have a sneaking suspicion that some of those most challenging bosses are amenable to tactics which you simply need to find rather than being straightforward battles of skill and reflex. Fall damage is not an issue until it is, in parts of Chapter 3! There is very limited parrying in Black Myth, which some will miss.

I got about a month of play out of Black Myth for the first run through, amounting to 98 hours gameplay but there is New Game+ to play and a couple of challenge features where you can refight bosses, this is well used to beat those foes that you first struggled with early in the game.

Overall I loved Black Myth Wukong, I can’t wait for the rumoured DLC

Jan 26 2025

Book review: The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker

I recently reviewed Understanding Pathological Demand Avoidance Syndrome in Children, this book follows that theme – I’m reviewing The Teenager’s Guide to Burnout by Dr Naomi Fisher and Eliza Fricker. The Teenager’s Guide is a far easier read, directed at teenagers rather than adults although it includes a section at the end for adults.

Dr Naomi Fisher is a clinical psychologist well-known for her work on the mental health of children, parenting and schooling. She experienced many different schools in different countries as a result of her parents’ life-style. Eliza Fricker is an illustrator and author and has experience of the issues covered in the book and drew the illustrations.

The book starts with some generally comments about stress and burnout which could apply to anyone, it’s useful in setting the scene although I did worry whether I’d got the right book. Perhaps surprisingly the book doesn’t mention “autistic burnout” except in the final section for adults where Fisher says that burnout is burnout, some children are neurodivergent but that’s not the key feature.

The action quickly moves on to school which in general is what will cause burnout in teenagers. The process of burnout is divided into four sections:

  1. Breakdown – burnout often seems to come out of the blue, a child is “fine at school” and then suddenly can no longer go in. It is traumatic for parents as well as children. Fisher (rightly) attributes this largely to the school environment and emphasises that a return to school should not be the short term gaol. This stage is about re-connecting with the child, it turns out our family sessions of Fortnite were actually a pretty good thing to do!;
  2. Repair – this is when we start to find the new normal with a child at home not at school, and a family rearranged to accommodate. There is often sadness here at the life apparently lost. This stage is about the teenager trying to find some enjoyment in life;
  3. Learning from the journey – this is about learning about what went wrong; why was it that school became unbearable? Sometimes as parents we will discover that our well meaning efforts were just pressuring our child and worsening the problem. I think of our efforts to get our son to see a counsellor here;
  4. The Road Ahead – this is about finding another path to education, outside of mainstream school. Part of the current process is, typically, to pressure children by telling them that mainstream school is the only option and they will be a failure if they don’t attend. Fisher describes it as a myth, really it is an outright lie;

Fisher believes that a key mistake most people make is to see a return to mainstream school as the goal throughout this process. If an adult had a burnout as a result of a high stress job we probably wouldn’t see going back to that job as the goal. She sees the school environment as being the problem which reflects the WHO recognition of burnout as an “occupational phenomena”. She cites increasingly high pressure methods used in schools to control behaviour (see SLANT), enforce attendance (“your parents will be fined and may go to prison if you don’t go to school”) and recover the academic progress lost during the pandemic. I have to say I agree with all of this.

Fisher is scathing about schools, pointing out her experience of so many different school systems highlights which school rules are in fact unnecessary she mentions UK uniform rules and the UK tradition of calling teachers “Sir and Miss” as examples of this. The world doesn’t end if you don’t wear a school uniform and address your teachers by their first name.

Fisher says a little about why burnout is an increasing problem, some of it is changes in the world – particularly the pandemic. She mentions world events like climate change meaning there is little to hope for in the future, as a child of the seventies and eighties I can say there is no change there – we feared nuclear annihilation! She says that in the past those suffering from burnout might have been diagnosed as having glandular fever or simply truants. It strikes me that in the past twenty years or so we have been become (on the face of it) much more understanding of mental health issues in adults but we don’t extend that sympathy to children.

I found her comments on friends and social development interesting, one of the key worries of those educating at home is the lack of social interactions. However, Fisher points out that frequently younger children have a quite limited social circle covering only family and relatives. Friendship at secondary schools has the air of protection, being in with a group so you are not alone at lunch time or the school gate, not the target of bullying. That said she provides a long list of venues outside school where teenagers might find new friends.

I suspect this book will be mainly read by parents; teenagers in the process of burnout are likely only receptive to it at stage 4 (The Road Ahead). The best time for an adult to get this book would be prior to stage 1, perhaps when the first signs of issues at school appear but it is useful at any time in the process. I heartily wish no one needed this book.

The Teenager’s Guide is great: for affirming we are not alone, for providing reassurance and also for providing some strategies to try for a better future. Although it is purportedly written for teenagers it is fine for adults, making for an easy read with short recaps at the end of each chapter. There are some handy tables / exercises which also act as summaries.