Everything
from scratch.

In 2019, I packed two suitcases, bought a one-way ticket from Johannesburg, and flew to London. No safety net. No plan beyond a quiet certainty that a different life was possible — and that the only way to find it was to go.

Then lockdown happened. Confined to a flat, with nowhere to be and nothing but time, I started watching bread videos. Then I started baking. The first loaves were terrible — dense, pale, barely edible. But there was something about the process I couldn't walk away from. The patience it demanded. The honesty of it. You can't rush dough, and you can't fake the result.

There was no chef. No mentor. No recipe passed down through generations. Just a phone propped against the kitchen wall, a bag of flour, and a stubborn refusal to accept failure. Bake after bake, something shifted. The crust started cracking the way it should. The crumb opened up. The smell when it came out of the oven — that smell — made everything worth it.

Friends tasted it. Then their friends. Then strangers started asking where the bread came from. What began as a way to survive an uncertain time became the most meaningful thing I'd ever made with my hands. Zio G's — named for the kind of person who feeds you without being asked — grew from that same impulse: make something genuinely good, and share it.

Today I bake every morning in Dorking, Surrey. Fifteen years as an IT engineer, two suitcases, one lockdown, and more flour than I can account for. Every loaf is still made by hand. Still without shortcuts. The spirit is exactly the same as that first messy, hopeful bake in a London flat — just a lot better.