‘I’m Stepping Out’/’Sleepless Night’ was the third single to be released from ‘Milk and Honey‘ on 15 March 1984.

John: On October the ninth, I’ll be forty and Sean will be five and I can afford to say, ‘Daddy does something else as well.’ In five years I hardly picked up a guitar. Last Christmas our neighbors showed him ‘Yellow Submarine’ and he came running in, saying, ‘Daddy, you were singing? Were you a Beatle?’ I said, ‘Well, yes!’

Yoko became the breadwinner, taking care of the bankers and deals. And I became the housewife. It was like one of those reversal comedies. I’d say, ‘Well, how was it at the office today, dear? Do you want a cocktail? I didn’t get your slippers, and your shirts aren’t back from the laundry.’

To all housewives, I say, ‘I now understand what you’re screaming about.’ My life was built around Sean’s meals.

Yoko: I’m sure there are many men who feel that they really would like to be at home, see to the baby, or maybe just cooking. A lot of men are very good cooks, and they like to exercise that talent but then it’s supposed to be something sissy and something you are not supposed to do. And also it’s mentally healthy to exchange roles, to see the other side.

John: I really feminised in a different way, and it was quite an experience. It was equivalent to going to a monastery and withdrawing in that way, But not going to a Zen monastery, going to India to meditate or going to Scotland and talking to bananas or melons or whatever they are doing up there in that famous place that’s supposed to grow big vegetables! In that way it was withdrawal.

I’ve mastered the art of rice, they say anyone can cook rice but few people cook it well. I can cook it reasonably well. I can do fish.

Yoko: You’re a good bread maker.

John: I’ve learned to make bread which I was thrilled with, I took a Polaroid of my first bread.

Yoko: In a good old macho tradition, he had to record it in history.

John: I was thrilled, it’s not macho, anybody would, it was the first bread. It looked great and it tasted good, that was pretty damned good. And so for about half a year, or a year, I was providing the food for Yoko, the baby, even the staff was eating. I was so excited that I could do it, that I would stop, bring all the staff in to each lunch, you know. But after a bit it was wearing me out. It was a Zen experience to master that cooking thing and put as much energy into that bread… and make it right…

Yoko: Which disappears very quickly.

John: Not just whack it away… I took it from scratch. Now I buy a packet of Pilsbury or something, it blows up into bread. From scratch with the flour and doing by hand…

John: The time between breakfast and lunch is very quick. You hardly have time to read the paper. That’s presuming it ain’t raining and the babysitter can take the child out, so you get a break from the constant ‘Daddy, look at this! Daddy, look at that! Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!’. Feed the cats. Then it’s bloody lunchtime. So this went on for about nine months, I really enjoyed it because I concentrated. I put my mind to it.

But it’s the meals! You live the regulation of between meals. And on the other side of me, there’s always just being served by women, whether it was my Auntie Mimi, God Bless You! And or whoever – served by females, wife, girlfriends; you just flop in drunk and expect some girlfriend at college to make the breakfast the next morning. You know she’d been drunk as a dog too, with you at the party. The female is supposed suddenly to get on the other side of the counter. It was quite an experience, and I appreciated what women have done for me all my life. I’d never even thought about it. A woman’s work is never done, you know…

Yoko: And he makes the bread…

John: And then there’s the dishes, that bloody machine!

Yoko: …and if you make bread, you want people to eat it and if they don’t eat it it’s a personal insult. So he went through that one, ‘Oh Yoko, aren’t you eating this? I made it…’

John: Ah, you didn’t like the bread yesterday.

Yoko: No, it’s just that I’m not hungry…

John: Well, the mother’s always hanging round saying, ‘Eat up, clean up your plate’, because you’ve put all the sweat into it, and then the kid comes in,‘I don’t like sausage!’

Yoko: He was going through the experience in a sort of tongue in cheek way, and…

John: They loved the bread, I’d make you two on Fridays, supposed to last a week, it ‘d be gone Saturday afternoon. Whoom!. Like pigs. Whomph! It’s gone. So I started buying the bread again. Pretty damned quick.

Yoko: Well, if we don’t eat it you are offended, if we eat it up, then you think, ‘Well then I have to make it again.’

John: But I enjoyed it, and I looked on it as a discipline, an absolute discipline, and that’s how I approached it. Through that I got into a whole other new world.