The hell with it: I was going to have my cake and eat it too. So I baked two
cakes. It was that simple – so simple I wondered why I’d never done it before.
When they were done, the sweet, stodgy smell of fresh Victoria sponge was so
overpowering I could hardly wait for them to cool before filling them with
strawberry jam and diving in.
And then she was at my door. Olive skinned, covered in a moth-eaten
shawl, eyes accusing. She carried a long cardboard tube under her arm.
“Can I help you?” I said as she barged past me into the kitchen.
Her reply was in a language I didn’t understand.
“I’m sorry?”
She shook her head and pulled a poster out of her tube, affixing it to
the wall with drawing pins and muttering as she did so.
“Ah,” I said. It was a series of graphs labelled with years, numbers and
dollar signs. My visitor’s peroration picked up speed and volume and from time
to time she would point at my cakes, raise two fingers at me and shake her head
again.
I shrugged. “Sorry,” I said. “Don’t understand.”
She sighed, took the poster down, rolled it up and put back in the tube,
replacing it with another one that showed a pie chart. A minuscule wedge of
this chart was coloured red, while the rest of it was blue. She pointed to the
blue part, to me, to the red part and finally to herself.
“Ah!” I said, understanding at last. I took a knife and cut a slice of
my cake to the exact angle of the segment in her chart and offered it to her.
A story about men, women, cake and not cake. Nicely done. And now I want cake too.
ReplyDeleteI'm less sure than @Rachael as to what this is about, but I like it. When the main ingredients are two Victoria sponges and an olive-skinned woman – what's not to like? This is weird as only Jon P can do it. Vintage stuff.
ReplyDelete