The heart of Saturday night: Banana bread

Strange as this may sound, often the only chance in Cambridge during term to take a quiet night in is Saturday. The hazard of intense seven week terms where the pace is driven by hyperactive undergrads is that you might try and hold out too long against the simple truth that you’re not eighteen any more, and need sleep.

The week was packed with the usual frenzy of events, a formal dinner, guest-lectures, rehearsals and the like. Friday I went to rehearsals and a friend’s PhD-completion drinks over karaoke, my regular pub night or female jazz vocals at St John’s College.

So Saturday, I planned to have in, expecting that after dinner – around eight – there’d be someone around to sip tea with and chat. It was faintly disheartening that the place seemed kinda deserted. Then, at about 9.30, I bumped into one of the Californians in the corridor.

“Hey, I’m glad to find life in our flat!” she chirped. “Do you have eggs, I’m making banana bread.”

After a rather random debate about the time at which bananas should be eaten, I traded my last egg for an anticipatory share of banana bread. (For the record, I think of ‘ripe’ as slightly soft and mushy, the Californian backed eating ‘em while the skin still has a tinge of green. I claimed her concept of ripe left a weird texture and aftertaste in my mouth, her view was that I left them until they tasted like floury apples or overcooked potato. Who knew?)

I made tea while the Californian went off to barter for more eggs. By eleven, we had banana bread and six around the table eating it and sipping tea and complaining about how we were all slowly falling asleep.

When I crawled into bed, I was amazed to discover that midnight had crept up unnoticed.