The drizzle, it drizzleth every day …..

The time has come for the fire to be lit in the daylight hours rather than at dusk. I use the term “daylight” loosely as “daygrey” would be more pertinent, both in luminance and mood. This is cake weather, where cake and coffee can be relied upon to provide toothsome warmth and comfort whilst serving to stem the onrushing grey tide that mentally announces winter’s arrival. Cake has come into my life twice and decamped but once. Memories of childhood lead me to the neologism of cakehood as, in those years, it was the promise of cake that defined landmark occasions. Birthdays, Christmases, Easters, successes and comfort for failures were all deemed cakeworthy. There were other landmark occasions, which had cake as the key player, that were equally memorable but less joyful such as my first visit to the relatively primitive surgery of a dentist of that era. Cake took its leave of me and my sugar beaten teeth, as I took my leave of school. The world of the early 60’s had much, much more to offer than cake to an adolescent whose hungers were now firmly situated at a point slightly lower than his stomach and not far above the gutter. Rumours and unclear Chinese whispers suggested to the young man, whose life to this point had been spent in single sex boarding schools, that henceforth sugar and spice and all things nice could be found far beyond Madeira and Battenberg and in new and extravagant packaging and so it proved to be. We now move on from those heady, carefree and cakefree days to the next Platonic relationship with cake. Now, having partaken of the sugar and spice, I had fathered children and Jenny and I guided those children through their cakehood, marking landmark occasions in the way that we remembered but with better dentistry. Yet it would take many more years before cake and I were reunited. That time is now and, in the second age of cake,  I am again happily lost in the sugary bosom of gateau once again.

 

This is a cake that gives drizzle a good name.