There is something so reassuring about the ritual – quietly weighing out butter, sugar, flour, cracking eggs, whisking, beating and folding.
All his life, he has been so careful about what he has said – weighing out every sentence by the teaspoon for nuance.
With the narrative stripped away, what's left is obituary — and the domestic similes that draw in the workaday ancient world: winnowers cleaning their chickpeas, a woman weighing out her weaving, fish trying to escape a ravaging dolphin.
And gloomy clerks are sympathetically measuring out 50g of cheese or liverwurst, packing two or three cracked eggs into a plastic bag (they are cheaper and so in great demand), or weighing out a single frozen chicken wing.
Simon Winchester: The Map that Changed the World, read by the author (Penguin £8.99) As a child, William Smith noted that the dairy 'pound stones' used for weighing out butter were covered in filigrees of fine lines.
His singing is pushed along with jibberish, real-life stories about cabs or big-ass purses, or a few coherent phrases carefully curated, probably, after running several mainstream bands' entire musical histories through a series of Markov algorithms and then weighing out the most recurring ideas.
