Bake Off winner Rahul: ‘For the first two years in Britain, I didn’t talk to anyone’

I fell in love with Rahul Mandal, this year’s winner of The Great British Bake Off, for a host of reasons. For the way he apologised for absolutely everything on the show, up to and including being incredibly talented. For the heartbreaking way he spoke to his mother on Skype and revealed he got into baking to make friends as a newly arrived immigrant in Britain. For how he talked about milk as if it were a superpower-giving substance, taught himself about Parisian bakeries by walking around the bakeries of northern Britain, scrunched up his chubby little face if he ever got a compliment and generally conveyed the kind of wide-eyed innocence usually only seen in cartoon characters such as Eeyore, Paddington and Wall-E.