12 minute read
A Country Living - David Mirus
The BV magazine, July ‘22
A COUNTRY LIVING David Mirus spends Tuesdays prepping in the bread shed. All Images: Courtenay Hitchcock
Early rise in the bread shed
The BV magazine, July ‘22 A COUNTRY LIVING
It’s a baker’s dozen of working hours for David Mirus, perfecting his sourdough before Wimborne awakes. Tracie Beardsley reports in A Country Living
As a self-confessed insomniac, ridiculously early starts and a punishing work regime don’t bother David Mirus. His alarm goes off at 12.30am in the week and midnight at weekends. He works through the night to make dough and prepare pastry for delicious bakewell tarts, scones and quiches. At 5am his wife Ann joins him to start on the fillings and the bakery opens at 9am. Before most of us have even got to work, David has already clocked up an eighthour day – and doesn’t finish until 2pm. Despite the 13-hour shifts, he has finally found his vocation at the age of 55. “This is what I was supposed to be doing all my life,” says the man who arrived from Australia as a 23-year-old with nothing more than a backpack. A former film and TV cameraman – his claim to fame is that two films he crewed on were voted the worst ever by film critic Barry Norman – he’s worked as a linen porter for the NHS (where he met his wife) and as a chef in numerous restaurants, pubs and clubs in Australia and London. He also has a degree in art.
To the bread shed
David now owns his artisan bakery – a family affair along with Ann and son Stefan. It’s tucked away down Mill Lane in Wimborne Minster, in a 260-year-old building that has seen many incarnations, from a mechanic’s garage to a furniture restorer’s workshop. With its roaring open wood oven, it’s now nicknamed the ‘bread shed’, and I defy anyone to walk past without being tempted to indulge. Its success in just three years has been phenomenal. Starting as a pop-up shop during the Wimborne Folk Festival, The Old Malthouse Bakery now has queues snaking around the block for its superb sourdough (250 loaves sold every Saturday) and renowned jam doughnuts – 120 sold daily, some partly responsible for my expanding waistline! “The alarm going off doesn’t bother me,” says David. “I go to bed about six in the evening but often still can’t sleep. I do get bad nights and if the bread suffers then I have to start again from scratch. Pastry is a devil – it will punish you if you try and make it when you’re in a bad mood. You’ve got to relax and be in the right mind-set for baking.” Music helps, and David makes pastry to loud German punk or the more mellow Elbow. The World Service is often his night-time companion. Having a Ukrainian father, he still has relations in Lviv so the news is of huge importance to him, as is the Ukrainian flag flying outside his bakery.
A family business
“Food has always been a big part of our family life,” David recalls. “My dad was a real foodie. Being Ukrainian, he’d come home with such delights as pig’s trotters and smoked eel for us to eat!” David’s 27-year-old son, Stefan, is responsible for breakfast baps, cinnamon rolls, teacakes and those legendary jam doughnuts. Natasha, his
Artisan baker David Mirus
youngest daughter, is also a talented baker but has chosen other paths. His other daughter Bryony didn’t seem to get the baking gene but she lived in Japan for two years and has come home with new cooking skills to share. With such a foodie-focused family, is there any watershed hour at home to stop talking about business? David says: “No, we’ve always talked about food so it never feels like we’re really talking about the business. I’ve been banned from eating my bread though. I’ve got a niece getting married this month so I’ve got to get into my wedding suit!” It’s only 8.30am when I finish the interview, time for David to lay out his array of delicious temptations as a queue already begins. I leave with a doughnut – be rude not to – and glad that I don’t have a wedding coming up myself!
The Malthouse Bakery, Mill Lane, Wimborne Open Wednesday to Saturday 9am to 2pm Facebook: The Old Malthouse Bakery – Wimborne
David Mirus starts his working day at midnight
David uses a wood-fired oven in conjunction with standard industrial ovens
The family bakery started as a pop-up shop during the Wimborne Folk Festival
Quick-fire questions with David:
A-list dinner party guests past or present?
My dad - he died at 89 about eight years ago. I’d love him to see how well the bakery is going and chat to him about it. And my Uncle Boris from Lviv – he died of Covid before I had the chance to meet him. Given what’s going on in that country, it would’ve been fascinating to get to know him. He also loved food!
Books on your bedside?
I’ve got one about coffee at the moment as we’ve just starting selling takeaway coffees – the proper stuff from Honduras. Before that, I was reading a book about sourdough. I guess I never really switch off from baking.
David sells 250 sourdough loaves every Saturday Image: David Mirus
Not every village has a close social life – Adrian Fisher describes how one Dorset village is successfully strengthening its sense of community.
One of the wonderful things about the recent jubilee was that local activities and celebrations continued for four days. It was a once-in-athousand years event, and it was incredibly special. Seeing some of the same local people day after day at various events nudged relationships up a notch or several. It is often said there is more direct social interaction in villages than in cities or their sprawling suburbs. Part of the reason is the open land around each village. It makes every person in every household more relevant, just because they are there. So we look out for them a bit more – if we don’t there is always the risk that no-one outside the village will. What really helps in a village is to gather, regularly and frequently. A pub is one way, but because it’s open all hours, all week, there is not quite the same sense of gathering everyone together at one time, regardless of who they are. Something like a darts night is great, but only if you are keen on darts!
A regular meeting
The ratio of village halls to houses in Dorset villages is remarkable. There’s a village hall in most villages, sometimes in a village with as few as 166 houses. Village halls are a great social resource, but they can tend to feel more institutional than a homely pub run by a keen landlord. Nevertheless, when there’s no pub in the village, some village hall committees have started holding a monthly Pub Night, which helps create a mustattend sense of occasion. And of course there’s another building nearly every village has – the church. Churches have character and attitude in spades; and as one of the oldest buildings in the village they are typically very central. A Sunday church service can lead to a social gathering place over coffee afterwards. But with falling attendances and often only monthly services, these occasions may be less regular now that clergy can be stretched to cover anything from a four-parish benefice to as many as eight churches.
A new way
However in Durweston every Thursday from 8.30 till noon, St Nicholas’ church is transformed into ‘St Nick’s Cafe’, with up to 60 people dropping in during the morning. About 150 people went along on the Thursday of the Jubilee weekend. The cafe was a instant hit and has become a sustained success. Parents come in before or after dropping off their children
St Nick’s Cafe
at the school (next to the churchyard); others come in at much the same time each week. Ideas arise, are discussed and the extra people needed are roped in. New events and activities are planned and carried through. The original idea for the Blandford Film Nights, run by the Blandford Welcome Group, was proposed to Duncan Kenworthy and the late Roger Graef in September 2021 at the St Nicholas Church parish fete. More than 200 people had turned out, and again it was a great success. One newcomer, Alan, is seeking to move from the Home Counties to Dorset. He had heard of the community activities in Durweston. On the Thursday morning he visited, he was utterly bowled over by what he found. Smiles were everywhere; longstanding fellow villagers were greeting each other with warmth and joy. Someone began singing in the kitchen. He said he had never come across anything like this before, and is now eagerly seeking to find a house locally.
New communities too
Refugee Ukrainian families also gather at St Nick’s, finding a place to speak to others in their own language, and to discuss their shared refugee situation. Vira, a Ukrainian teacher of the English language at high school and college level, told me that the warmth of welcome and desire at a personal level to help had been immensely impressive. But at the government level,
less so. The one recurring theme among Ukrainians is the difficulty of finding work. After all they have been through, it is crushing not to be able to do something useful. For Vira, the prospect of having Villagers were to spend years replicating her greeting each qualifications before doing what other with she is immensely proficient warmth and at doing, teaching English to Ukrainians, is soul-destroying. joy. Someone It’s not as if we don’t have began singing lots of Ukrainians all around in the kitchen us, who desperately need to master English before they can get a job (as Irina, a proficient beautician, discovered when seeking work at beautician businesses in Blandford). St Nick’s Cafe is a remarkable success story, which has already transformed the life and spirit of Durweston. Let us hope that other villages can do something similar and build on the strengths that village life can offer.
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The BV magazine, July ‘22
NEWS
ADVERTORIAL
Why do we CARE?
At Wells Cathedral School and Little Wellies Nursery, we think that even with our smallest pupils, we need to remember to focus on the bigger picture. Our school values of Creativity, Aspiration, Responsibility and Endeavour are at the heart of all that we do. These four values - which appropriately also spell the word “CARE” - inspire us as teachers to nurture and develop these qualities in our pupils, with the aim of assisting them in becoming amazing young people that leave school with huge potential for life’s successes.
Why do we put such emphasis on these values?
Simply put, it is these qualities - alongside our Learning Powers of resilience, motivation, curiosity, careful thinking and resourcefulness - that are so often the strong predictors of success in life. These are skills that run through every year of our educational journey from Nursery all the way up to eighteen. They grow and develop, and increase in complexity and maturity as the children work their way through school and then into their adult lives. When our children are faced with challenges or things get tough - as has been the case for so many of us in recent years - it is these qualities that will get them through.
Reach for the Stars
At our school assemblies, we delve into what these, for a little child, rather big words mean! It is our job in Pre-Prep to turn these large, somewhat generic words into things that really mean something to our children. A recent focus for us has been ‘Aspiration’. We started assembly by playing the song ‘Reach for the Stars’, and explaining to the children that this means to believe in oneself and reach high. Children need to be shown how high they can reach. Having established this idea, we couldn’t think of any better way to show this than to let our Nursery and Pre-Prep children observe the older children in the School. We chose to focus on the performing arts, and let our children enjoy a whole host of opportunities, devised and delivered by pupils from our Junior School and Senior School. One particularly memorable occasion was when our Senior School musicians put on an inspiring workshop, playing popular Disney songs on a whole host of instruments. This inspired the children in PrePrep to come back exclaiming that they want to play every instrument under the sun! More recently, our Pre-Prep children also had the wonderful experience of watching a dress rehearsal for our Junior School production of Shrek, featuring pupils from Year 3 to Year 6. Our youngest children could not have been more inspired. They could not believe that underneath those costumes and all that make-up were some of the older children that they actually know! These opportunities make our children feel like anything is possible if they work for it. Our children are of course incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by such inspiring role models, and we as teachers feel just as fortunate to work with them. So while we aim to inspire them, they also amaze, delight and inspire us, creating a cycle of aspiration where we’re all helping each other achieve our own personal success. We’re all reaching for the stars together!
John Fosbrook Director of Admissions
