Ancient Ideas and Modern Life Skills in UK Prisons

Around 100,000 individuals in the UK are serving prison sentences. Some have access to training in skills to help them find employment on release, but far too few are helped to ask the big questions about their purpose in life, to which ancient Greek thought has rich answers. 

What would the best version of myself look like? What would I regret not doing on my deathbed? Will I be happier if I try to be a good person? What is true friendship and how best can choose whom to love? How do I make decisions? How do I become an expert communicator? 

Over the last 18 months, with the help of my colleague Prof. Arlene Holmes-Henderson and other allies, and in collaboration with NOVUS Education, I have achieved a long-held ambition to bring ancient ethics, rhetoric and art, mostly via Aristotle, to incarcerated students. The results have been profound and moving, as documented in the Guardian. 

The feedback has been extraordinary. Students tell us that the ‘potential’ session has helped them thoroughly reevaluate what they could achieve in life; performing a Greek tragedy with improvised props and discussing the moral and emotional issues it raises have helped them see how they have been misled or provoked; when we bestow the trophy for best actor (decided by classroom vote) there are tears and palpable pride; rhetorical insights have already helped them deescalate conflict on the wing. 

I have found these sessions to be the most fulfilling experience of pedagogy in my entire working life. Neglected men and women whose brains have had no stimulation bar daytime television are so thirsty for knowledge and philosophy that it is painful to leave at the end of each course. 

That is why, in January, Arlene and I trained eleven prison educators to deliver the course so it can reach far more students. But we want to continue delivering it ourselves and the funding Durham University generously gave us to set up the initiative has run out. 

We teach for free, of course, but do need to stay in Travelodges and take trains. I have just donated £4000 myself to kickstart our new fundraiser, aiming to get to the £20,000 we need to reach eight or more prisons over the next two years. Please help if you can here. 

An important note on the donation website. When you get to the payment page that looks like this you can remove the tip JustGiving wants by clicking ENTER CUSTOM AMOUNT and changing it to 0.00. 

We are also developing three further courses: an advanced Ethics course, by popular demand, which will think more about intentions, dilemmas, apologies, death, bereavement and suicide; a content-based course on Classical Civilisation and Ancient History for those unlikely to be released; and a course on literacy using ancient linguistic stems to help with spelling and syntax. 

I’ll continue to update progress via this blog. Please, please help us enhance the life chances of some of the most marginalised members of the community.

Teaching Ancient Ethics in English Prisons: An Update

 

Tonight I’m driving with my colleague in all things, Professor Arlene Holmes-Henderson, to teach for a week in a prison, our PhD student Katharine Russell assisting. This is our third such institution, selected with our partner Novus Education, in nine months. We’ve honed our course in response to lucid feedback from our highly engaged and intelligent students, which you can sample on the Against the Lore Podcast.

We started out doing a general course in Classical Civilisation/Ancient History, about half of which was practical ethics in an Aristotelian vein. But almost all of them voted for more moral philosophy and fewer emperors, statues and inscriptions. Everyone also LOVED performing the play.

For the men’s prisons we have already taught in, we chose Sophocles’ Philoctetes, basically the story of a guiltless man stuck in solitary confinement for a decade by cruel and perfidious ‘comrades’. The discussions after the (outstandingly vigorous) performances led by Drs George Gazis and Rosie Wyles, have addressed rage, revenge, despair, sticking to principles and the difficulties men have sorting out power hierarchies in institutions like armies…and prisons.

With Rosie, Katharine and Arlene

This week is our first women’s institution, and we are doing Antigone. Standing up to horrible patriarchs, unjust punishments, bereavement, loyalty to family, problematic sisters, suicide… I’ll have more to report on that next week.

Teaching these students is emotionally exhausting. The whole process is making me more than ever convinced that our current penal system is inappropriate to the point of lunacy. A huge proportion of our (voluntary) attendees were in care as children and thrust out to fend for themselves at 18. They are bored out of their minds, often locked up in cells for 20 or more hours a day, with only the brain-wrecking daytime TV for stimulation.

Learning to cook or plaster walls for a living--courses to which most prisoners do have access--doesn’t feed the intellect, the imagination or the soul. What Aristotle offers is help with planning how to become the best version of themselves that they would have been if their potential and teleological journey to self-fulfilment had not been derailed by inadequate or non-existent love, approval, education, guidance and/or stimulation in childhood and adolescence.

The most popular sessions besides the tragedy performance are on rhetoric or learning to communicate and listen; the question of whether aiming to be good makes you happy, led by our colleague Professor Phil Horky; decision-making; and choosing and keeping real friends. We are hoping to get more funding to pay our petrol and Travelodge rooms for another year. Think of our Durham University Classics team and our brave new students diving deep into Greek ethics this week; I’ll post later about how you might be able to help.

Review of Dan Mendelsohn's Translation of the ODYSSEY

 

Homer’s Odyssey is the most familiar work of ancient literature besides Aesop’s Fables. It has been translated into most world languages and transformed into countless operas, plays, novels, poems, paintings and video games. Its second half, narrating Odysseus’ return to Ithaca,  has recently been made into an emotional and realistic movie filmed in Greek and Italian sea-washed locations. Directed by Uberto Pasolini and starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, its UK release is imminent. Christopher Nolan’s fantasy-action film of the entire epic, which features Matt Damon as Odysseus, astounding special effects, supernatural encounters with immortal nymphs and the enormous Cyclops, is due to dazzle us next year. I hope this mass-market cultural prominence draws attention to Dan Mendelsohn’s sonorous new translation of the original poem.

         His rendering of the epic into its authentic metre, the dactylic hexameter, has been keenly anticipated; in his memoir-cum-literary-interpretation An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (2017), he revealed his intense personal engagement with the story, especially Odysseus’ relationship with his son Telemachus as the young man is initiated into Bronze Age manly protocols. Mendelssohn’s skill as translator of Greek verse has also been demonstrated in his sensitive translations of another admirer of the Odyssey, C.P. Cavafy (2009-2012).

         Some of his innovations, such as glossing proper names with their meanings (‘Eurýalos Broad-Sea’), are illuminating to the Greekless reader. His metrical dexterity comes over in the pleasing rhythms he’s found for even the most formulaic of lines: ‘She of the bright owl-eyes, the goddess Athena, addressed him’, where the long vowels of the spondaic ‘bright owl-eyes’ are emphasised by the surrounding patter of dactyls.

His translation of the Odyssey’s celebrated opening couplet is an aesthetic manifesto in itself:

Tell me the tale of a man, Muse, who had so many roundabout ways

To wander, driven off course, after sacking Troy’s hallowed keep.

The alliteration (T/t, m/M, w/w), the enjambement (continuing the phrase beyond the line-end) and the sweet variety of emphasised vowels in the second line (a-oy-a-ee), suggestive of Ezra Pound’s commitment to ‘tone-leading of the vowels’ in sung verse, remind us forcefully that Homeric epic was enjoyed in oral performance accompanied by a lyre. A comparison with the other 21st-century attempt at a hexameter Odyssey (2002), by Rodney Merrill, a former Berkeley Professor of English, is instructive:

 

Tell me, Muse, of the man versatile and resourceful, who wandered

many a sea-mile after he ransacked Troy’s holy city.

 

This is far less euphonious. It also specifies that Homer’s notoriously ambiguous epithet ‘polutropos’ means qualities of character, where Mendelsohn’s ‘who had so many roundabout ways /To wander’ leaves the types of wandering—experiential, psychological, geographical—open to interpretation. His shrewd decision to avoid the standard ‘city’ for the ptoliethron of Troy reminds us that this ‘keep’ was no modern conurbation but a fortress with high defensive walls—which Odysseus had enabled his comrades to penetrate by the ruse of the wooden horse. Such intense intellectual activity has motored his aesthetic choices throughout the remaining 12,107 lines. Where Merrill uses archaisms (‘scion’, ‘no whit’, ‘hither’), and in his desire for fidelity to Homer reproduces word order that is almost incomprehensible in English,  Mendelsohn steers an impeccable course between sounding contemporary and preserving the melancholy and grandeur of the Greek. I would have preferred him not to capitalise the first letter of each line, however; for the reader (though not the listener), this somewhat disrupts the fine flow of the enjambement to which his translation is gloriously sensitive.

         Mendelsohn brilliantly conveys how Homeric lines roll forward hypnotically, each arranged around six rhythmical pulses, vocalized in two clusters or asymmetrical half-lines. They have a measurable physiological impact: medical research has shown that patients’ heart and respiratory rates decelerate when they read them. Yet, since Alexander Pope’s bestseller (1725), many Odyssey translators have chosen the indigenous English iambic pentameter, including Emily Wilson in her vivid, fast-paced Odyssey (2017); Mendelsohn could have refrained in his introductory essay from dyspeptic criticism of the difficulties cramming Homeric verses into iambics without losing words. There is more than room for diverse up-to-date renderings of this timeless poem: my undergraduates love Wilson’s breezy modernity.  But Mendelsohn is correct that only the dactylic hexameter can express the acoustic resonance of the original; since this metre did not relate to the predominantly iambic natural rhythm of Greek speech, Homer sounded elevated and even unearthly to his ancient audiences—an effect worth reproducing.

The dispute about the appropriate metre for Homeric translation is centuries old. German poets controversially attempted hexameter Odysseys in the 18th century; Goethe’s friend Vasily Zhukovsky’s Russian hexameter translation, however, made an incalculable impression on Slavic aesthetic culture in 1849. It was Matthew Arnold whose On Translating Homer (1861), in response to the turgid ersatz Anglo-Saxon Iliad by UCL Classics Professor Francis Newman (1856), made a cogent case for reviving the ancient metre. Poets including Longfellow and Kingsley began experimenting with it in original poems, and numerous clunky, mediocre hexameter versions of Homer soon followed.

What I feel Mendelsohn has appreciated, in the way most of them have not, is the connection between the Odyssey’s maritime content and the rolling effect of its broad-sweeping verse: as Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it in ‘The Homeric Hexameter’ (1803), 

Strongly it bears us along in swelling and limitless billows,

Nothing before and nothing behind but the sky and the ocean.

 

When Jorge Luis Borges’ eyesight began to fail, he spoke of divining the ‘murmur of glory and hexameters…of black vessels searching the sea for a beloved isle’. The highest compliment I can pay Mendelsohn is that his translation of my favourite episode, Odysseus’ heroic swim to Phaeacia, is the most excitingly energetic I’ve ever read: Odysseus ‘Straddled a plank with his legs as if he were riding a racehorse’. He heard ‘the thundering thud of the reef as the sea crashed against it/ Since the massive swells were dashing against the shoreline, roaring /Fearfully, everything frothed with foam churned up from the sea’. I doubt that even Nolan’s movie can make this ordeal remotely as visceral and spectacular.

Preserving Democracy & Resisting Tyranny with Aristotle

Friends, especially Americans, and people I’ve encountered recently are all asking the same question: when democracy, free speech, truthful journalism and civil society are under attack, and governments are under the influence of malign and financially rapacious individuals, how are ‘ordinary’ people to fight back? 

One answer to this question lies in Aristotle’s dazzling dissection in his Politics 5 of the mechanisms implemented by tyrants to perpetuate their power. He had personally survived several years as a hired hand in the murderous, faction-ridden court of a brutal despot, Philip II of Macedon, and he knew whereof he spoke. 

If a tyrant is to survive, says Aristotle, he must not only silence outstanding opponents but wipe out all the social habits that, by fostering frequent friendly interactions, bind communities together (1313a-b). The customs he identifies as particularly threatening to a tyranny’s perpetuation (practices which were standard in the Athenian democracy where he preferred to live) have always intrigued me. He lists them as these: 

• public, communal eating; 

• membership of clubs and societies; 

• education, including study-circles and other arenas for debate. 

The reason is that such activities engender in those who participate not only intelligent sharing of information but a sense of self-worth, and, crucially, mutual trust. These forms of companionship and sharing of leisure-time, interests, information and views not only make people of different households more educated, but help them to know and understand each other better. 

This congenial and cooperative social fabric ultimately makes it impossible for the tyrant to “divide and rule”. So there is one way to resist--through our everyday behaviours--the atmosphere of suspicion and ignorance the tyrant needs to foster, and that is to participate in a friendly manner in all such interactions and collective activities. 

Get out for a pub meal and talk to other diners; carry on with your quiz nights, photography classes, sports teams and church choirs; enrol for that course at the local Institute of Continuing Education; put down your phone and talk to your postman or window cleaner; start up conversations with your shop assistant, fellow passengers on the train or your taxi driver. 

Discuss, debate, befriend, be kind: no tyrant has ever succeeded in overwhelming a community that behaved as if it were not ruled by a tyrant. Today I'm going to celebrate the blossom in a local wood with other tree-lovers, and then to the pub for banter. Get out there.  It is up to us. 

Location Filming on Women Gladiators

 

A few weeks ago, Barney Rowe, a brilliant young TV producer specializing in factual history, asked if I could join his team at Tomos TV who are making a documentary about female gladiators. I’d encountered Barney through the Against the Lore podcast, which is making an episode on my work teaching in prisons, so I trust his motives completely. Amazingly, I was able to shift round things in my schedule sufficiently to find myself on Wednesday fighting for survival in something that felt like gladiatorial combat in the non-priority Ryanair queue at Luton Airport on my way to Naples.

Senatus Consultum of 19 CE 

 First up, we filmed at the Samnite Museum of Campobasso, which houses an extraordinary inscription recording a decree of the Senate of 19 CE banning women of the equestrian and senatorial classes as well of men from performance on stage or fighting in the arena. The Emperor at the time, Tiberius, was keen to reinforce social class distinctions and therefore police the conduct of upper-class females.

Roman Women Entertaining themselves IN PRIVATE. From Pompeii or Herculaneum

On day 2, I found myself driving a Volkswagen round hairpin bends up the terrifyingly steep peak of Montecasino, with Eduardo the cameraman sticking a camera in the back of my neck from behind my seat and a drone hovering like a techno-mosquito in front of the windscreen. I did not dare tell the team that I had scarcely driven since a car accident in Guernsey in 2021.

The nerve required for this hair-raising car stunt was rewarded when we found our quarry in the museum of the monastery on the mountain’s summit—the magnificent stone inscription which an aristocratic woman named Ummidia Quadratilla had placed at the entrance of the amphitheatre she had built—and funded—for her citizens. UMMIDIA QUADRATILLA BUILT THE AMPHITHEATRE AND TEMPLE FOR THE PEOPLE OF CASINA WITH HER OWN MONEY. SUA PECUNIA FECIT. Girl-Boss or what?

At Ummidia's Inwscription with Assistant Producer Rachele Fregonese

We know about Ummidia from her splendid Mausoleum and especially a letter by Pliny (7.24) which my colleague at Durham, Professor Roy Gibson, had briefed me on and I read, on screen, from a suitably antique-looking book kindly lent to me by Nicholas Denyer at Cambridge. 

The daughter of a governor of Syria, she had inherited a fortune, which had allowed her to enjoy her taste for spectacular entertainments in the liberal days of Nero; she had a troupe of pantomime (masked ballet) dancers whom she leased out, and a large following of cheerleaders to get the audiences going. 

Ummidia's Amphitheatre

There was overlap between pantomime dancing and gladiatorial spectacle, so I got to brandish a replica pantomime mask of the helmeted Minerva similar to this one when filming at Ummidia’s amphitheatre.

It takes a village to make a TV documentary. The camera and sound men from Rome were constantly encouraging.

With Cameraman Eduardo and Sound Technician Giacomo

The uber-competent and kind director Susannah Ward was a delight to work with. She gave us all canisters of olive oil decorated with amphitheatres when the British team—also including Barney and Rachele Fregonese, whose combined research for the documentary had been as rigorous and meticulous as any professional academics’—we reluctantly parted.

I’ve never really aspired to do TV. It is bewilderingly hard physical work and I want to be able to go to supermarkets without being recognized. I tried once or twice to hawk myself round ghastly North London parties to suck up to Very Important People in the industry, but always ended up (a) wondering why they were so up themselves and (b) drinking with the wine-waiters in the kitchen. But these people have restored my faith in the possibility that TV people can be excellent humans.

Parting from Susannah, Barney and Raquele at Naples Airport

I can’t wait to see the show, which will hit history channels and Channel 5 in due course. I dared the crew to include this oil lamp, found in Southwark, which an article by writer and tireless supporter of Classics Caroline Lawrence, who was very generous with her time and assistance, had led me to. It shows clearly how female gladiators affected the Roman erotic imagination. It might not be allowed on American television. But then America is descending further every minute into a cultural desert as well as a proto-fascist dystopia.

My Telegraph article on Gladiators in Britain

 

The brutal reality of gladiators in Roman Britain

Headless skeletons, feral bears and female fighters – a new British Museum show revolutionises our understanding of life in 175 AD

 Edith Hall

 

It’s 175 AD in Colchester – then called Camelodunum – a prosperous industrial town. Several thousand people are making their way past villas, pottery factories and temples of Jupiter and the deified Claudius to the amphitheatre. Local Britons, descended from the tribes who long ago rebelled under Cunobelinus (Cymbeline) and Boudicca, now live peacefully side-by-side with retired legionaries from Gaul, Thrace, Italy and Anatolia.

After buying refreshments from market traders at the entrance, they take their seats on wooden benches around the oval arena to await the day’s entertainment. First, hares and deer are released, followed by a large, ravenous dog, who takes some time to shed the first blood of the day. Then, to great applause, the famous venators (hunt-showmen) Marius and Secundus, armed with only a whip and a cudgel, subdue an enraged bear. 

But the climax is a long-awaited showdown between the professional gladiators. Loud applause greets the helmeted Memnon, a celebrity African combatant who has adopted the stage-name of an Ethiopian superhero who fought Achilles at Troy. It is Memnon’s ninth appearance here; he has always won. He takes the role of secutor, armed with sword and shield; the retiarius with a hunting net and trident is named Valentinus, sent by a division of the 30th legion stationed in Gaul. Few retiarii have ever kept Memnon at bay for long; he has the advantage of being left-handed and difficult to ward off. Valentinus eventually drops his net and Memnon lifts his sword to strike. Valentinus points his index finger upwards to concede defeat. The crowd roars to signal whether he should live or die.

We can time-travel to these thrilling spectacles because they are illustrated on a clay vase made locally around the time of the event, which will be on display at the British Museum throughout its touring exhibition Gladiators in Britain, which opens at the Dorset Museum & Art Gallery on January 25 and travels throughout the rest of year. The vase was buried at the funeral of a middle-aged man, perhaps a deceased gladiator. The names were inscribed before the pot was fired. It was one of the more elaborate souvenirs that spectators could purchase at stalls around the amphitheatres in at least ten towns in the province of Britannia. 

Gladiator culture united this north-western extremity of the Roman Empire with hundreds of towns across the Roman world, from Algeria to Israel, Spain to Syria. Britannia was no rustic backwater, but a thriving and cosmopolitan civilisation receptive to all the technology and culture that flourished under the Roman Empire.

 Gladiators were common across Roman Britain – and evidence for them is abundant. At Richborough in Kent, the arena wall was painted in brilliant hues of red and blue. Chester offers plentiful evidence for portable fast-food ovens and souvenir shops. Londonium’s amphitheatre, beneath Guildhall Yard, sported tiled entrances. At Aldborough in North Yorkshire (Isurium Brigantum) the amphitheatre entertained the merchant travellers who passed through this trade point at the highest navigable point on the river Ure.

One of the oldest arenas was constructed at Silchester, the capital of the Atrebates tribe, in around 75 AD. It could seat around 7,000 – a capacity midway between the Royal Albert Hall and the O2 Arena. The clergyman William Lisle Bowles visited it in the early 19^th century, recalling, “Here – where the summer breezes waved the wood / The stern and silent gladiator stood, /And listened to the shouts that hailed his gushing blood.”

 A muddier envisioning of Silchester gladiators occurs in the Roman Britain action movie Eagle (2011), directed by Kevin Macdonald and adapted from Rosemary Sutcliff’s novel The Eagle of the Ninth (1954). In the film, the British youth Esca (played by Jamie Bell of Billy Elliot fame) faces death at the hands of a gladiator clad in a sinister full-face helmet, but is rescued by the Roman centurion Marcus Aquila (Channing Tatum) before they travel north to seek the famously missing 9th Legion.

 Meanwhile, the Neolithic henge at Maumbury Rings near Durnovaria (Dorchester) was converted into an amphitheatre in around 100 AD, its arena levelled with chalk and sand and recesses built into the walls to house the caged animals. Thomas Hardy used this atmospheric sense of a long-buried history to echo the pain of a lost marriage in The Mayor of Casterbridge; Michael Henchard arranges his clandestine reunion there with Susan, the wife he has not met for eighteen years. The emotional turbulence is reflected by the overgrown grass, “bearded with withered bents that formed waves under the brush of the wind, returning to the attentive ear Aeolian modulations, and detaining for moments the flying globes of thistledown”.

More recent archaeological finds have revealed more about the appearance of gladiators in Roman Britain, including a visually intimidating copper alloy helmet found at Hawkedon, Suffolk which is on show at the exhibition. The short City of London street named Poultry revealed an oil lamp portraying a fallen Samnite gladiator. The popularity of gladiator culture is further demonstrated by more than forty knife handles carved to portray fighting gladiators that have been discovered, from Corbridge and South Shields to Caerwent, Monmouthshire. Cupids fight as miniature gladiators on a mosaic from Bignor Roman villa in West Sussex.

Less certain evidence is provided by the more than 80 decapitated skeletons of well-built men under 45 found in a Roman cemetery in York, some of whom came from Syria, may have been gladiators; one of them had been bitten by a large carnivore. They may have been criminals beheaded in the arena after being forced to fight with beasts. Although female gladiators are attested in Rome and Antioch, it may be wishful thinking that has interpreted the skeleton of a twenty-something Romano-British woman found in Great Dover Street, Southwark, as belonging to a gladiatrix; the evidence is only that she was wealthy, perhaps suggesting a successful career in the arena, and that one of the oil lamps buried with her depicts a gladiator.

The exhibition will breathe new life into our understanding of ancient British recreation, revealing that new finds extend the evidence for the appreciation of gladiators across all England and Wales. Just last year, a delightful figurine found on the banks of the Tyne near Hadrian’s Wall depicts a perky, helmeted gladiator, and he is left-handed. Did Memnon, after his ninth victory at Colchester, tour every amphitheatre in Britannia?

---

Gladiators of Britain runs until April 2026; further details, see: britishmuseum.org

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University. Her forthcoming book is Epic of the Earth (Yale, £18.99) 

 

A Week in Classics: Progress, Celebration and Grief

What a week that was. Forgetting that my surgeon told me last year I had to slow down, on Tuesday we wound up our pilot course, attached to both the Durham-based campaign Advocating Classics Education and the Durham Leverhulme-funded research project Aristotle beyond the Academy, bringing ancient civilizations and especially ethics to students in prisons. It has been an extraordinarily fulfilling activity for me and we hope to expand it nationally. 

The men’s favourite sessions were all related to Aristotle: they lapped up Arlene Holmes-Henderson’s advice on effective communication via his Rhetoric, and with George Gazis’ help debated Neoptolemus’ decision to change his mind and help the suffering Philoctetes in Sophocles’ tragedy—a mind-change of which Aristotle approves—after performing the play with enormous verve. Philoctetes’ vocalisations were thrilling and we gave him the Best Actor trophy. 

But the favourite session was Professor Phil Horky on the Nicomachean Ethics. What is happiness and will you be happier if you try to be the best version of your moral self? Questions for the ages. There will be a podcast on this whole course soon, with the students themselves talking, made by our wonderful colleagues at Against the Lore. Everyone enjoyed my home-made vanilla and chocolate chip cookies (contained in festive tin, below), I’m pleased to report. 

With Rory McInnes-Gibbons, Zenia and Meg from Against the Lore, Arlene

Wednesday saw three back-to-back events in Durham: first up, Alessandro Vatri’s excellent paper on Margaret Doody’s Aristotle Detective novels; Arlene Homes-Henderson then launched her essential new Centre for Classics Education Research and Engagements (CERES), which will transform how we understand the history and practice of classical-subject pedagogy. I had made a cake for her, which wasn’t as good as the cookies but served its purpose. Last up was Nebojša Todorović’s superb Durham Prize in Classical Reception lecture on Greek literature and its performance reception in relation to the Balkan War of the 1990s. 

Thursday was much sadder, as we held a valedictory retrospective event for our department’s beloved emeritus professor Christopher Rowe, who is mortally ill. He spoke with such mirth and sometimes trenchant barbs about his life in philosophy that my tears, at least, turned from those of grief to near-convulsive laughter. He has changed Platonic and Aristotelian Studies, but he also transformed the Department when I was first there in the early 2000s. More on this titan of virtue and friendship anon. People were relieved that I had done no baking and had offered shop-bought mince pies instead.