About Corinna
Corinna Chapman was born in Nimbin, a hippie colony in Victoria, Australia. She is not exactly sure of the date, as neither is her mother (considering that measurement of time is a male construct) but knows that it was winter because her birthday celebrations were always conducted by dancing in the freezing mud. As she considers Geminis to be incurably light minded, she identifies with the sign of Cancer, the Crab. This means that she is provided with a hard shell but is gentle and sensitive underneath it. Not that many people find that out. Most retreat after the initial nipping.
She was rescued from the mud when she was five by her grandmother, the formidable Mrs Edna Chapman, her father's mother. After lessons in table manners, washing, the wearing of shoes and combing of hair, she was sent to school, where she showed an early facility with numbers and a unquenchable desire for order and neatness. Mrs Chapman, an unyielding, strict woman who believed that hugging children was pandering to sentimentality, sent her to a strict girl's secondary school, where she learned all she knows about evasion, concealement, violence and lying.
She went to university to become an accountant. Just as she was finishing her degree, Mrs Chapman died, and Corinna met her future husband, James Knott. He seemed at the time to be just what she wanted; reliable, solid, unbearably sophisticated. Corinna was honoured that he had chosen her. He discerned in Corinna the right amount of uncertainty which meant that he could mould her into the kind of wife he felt he deserved; one who would meet him at the door with a drink, wearing a blue gingham pinny and carrying his slippers.
Corinna obliged and became just what he wanted, while carrying on her own career. This state of affairs lasted until she woke up one morning and realized that if she excised James from her life, she would not have to spend her lunch hour looking for the right kind of truffles for his omelette. She ripped off the apron and decamped from his life and has never regretted it.
It is unwise to wear blue gingham in her presence.
After leaving James she also left accounting. With her sourdough mother of bread, her settlement and Grandma Chapman's estate, she bought the shop Earthly Delights in an eccentric building in Melbourne and settled down to make bread. She defiantly cleared all her debts in the first year, living mostly on bread and cheese.
Things have been exciting around Insula lately, with mysteries, and Goths, and Daniel Cohen, who is gradually getting past Corinna's claws and inside her shell. Her cats, Horatio the upstairs cat and Heckle and Jekyll, the Mouse Police, are well and removing rats from her bakery. Jason Wallace continues in her employ, inventing ever more fascinating muffins. Corinna is thirty seven and considers that being thirty eight in her present company is going to be a blast. She weighs one hundred kilos, and is never, ever, going to go on a diet..
