Friday, July the 15th, 2005
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I know that readers always look forward to Cake News, our weekly round-up of news, views and demented rantings from the world o' cake. Whether you're an aficionado of chocolate swiss roll or of Old Mother Brimstone's blob triangles, you'll find Cake News essential reading.
Sometimes you might find yourself miles away from the nearest cake-shop, at the wheel of a tractor belching poisonous fumes perhaps, out in a field, suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to eat a sponge cake with raspberry jam filling. And yet all you have with you, tucked in the cubby of your tractor, is a flask of water, and the water is stale, because you filled the flask from a spigot over a fortnight ago. The moon is shining brightly and fat stars splatter the sky. You are engaged in illicit night-time tractoring, for you are a malefactor soaked in crime. But even criminals need cake, as was pointed out long ago by the social scientist Vargas Vorgas Vig, who wrote: “My studies have shown that cake appetite is not dependent upon the subjects' propensity for law-breaking, malfeasance and pelf.”
In Biblical times, of course, you might expect manna to fall from heaven (see for example Exodus 16: xiv), but these are not Biblical times, clearly, for if they were you would not be driving a tractor. In those days they had no tractors. Where then, are you to find the succour of cake, out in a field in the middle of the night? The sad answer, I am afraid, is that you are not. You will have to abandon your tractor and trudge to the nearest town and locate a cake-shop, and if it is shut, as it will be, during the night, you will have to jemmy the lock, which you will do with skill, being a criminal, and creep on tiptoe to the cake-shop pantry to find the cake-hoard. Ah, but there too you will find Inspector Smedley the Cake Detective, who will place his mighty paw on your shoulder and place you under arrest.
The moral of this story is that you should always wait for a cake-shop to open its shutters in the morning.