Things I learned this year

for me in  2023 there was

rather too much dampness

sad intervals 

and toothache

a weirdly hot 1st week of September

a new king 

 

the nice bits involved swimming and Christmas cake

 

I learned about the Japanese expression Kuuki wo yomu -  'reading the air' 

This is not simply an ability to 'read the room' 

In Japan this is an extreme and excruciating mind game, mainly used to establish and maintain hierarchical structures, the underling must become telepathic.

Kanako illustrated the concept with a story about when she worked for a small fashion company - her boss liked to perform the idea that his employers (the women) were his equals. Every day they would all go out for lunch together. Every day he would ask one of the women to say where they should go to eat. Each woman dreaded her turn to say because it was all about guessing correctly where the boss wanted to go  - the inability to 'read the air' has it's own specific and derogatory term - KY (like being called 'backward') and is apparently a career-killer 

 

I made a cake with rapeseed oil

It was delicious and I have just eaten another piece

then I carried on typing and noticed a dark flake on my keyboard - thinking it to be a missed piece of cake I popped it in my mouth.

IT WASN"T CAKE!!!

a regular visitor

to the Brain Surgery arrived today with scars on her arm

and I've got a bad leg,  I've not been line dancing for a fortnight

what happened?

I was running down the path with cake

???

 my niece visited and I forgot to give her cake -  so I ran after her with it and slipped

did you land on the cake?

no but my husband was so angry with it that he swore at it and kicked it right to the end of the path

Words of the Day

Effigiate

v. to represent by a picture or sculpture
example:
That custard tart looks so good  someone should effigiate it

Tartilate

v. finding that someone else has already eaten the second tart

example: 
That's the hedge trimmed I'll go inside for a coffee and custard tart
I'm sorry but you appear to have tartilated

The Cake of Mild Embarrassment

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I made my first ever Christmas cake two weeks ago, it is mainly marzipan with a sliver of fruit cake running through the middle of it, keeping to tradition there is a coating of crispy lemon icing round the outside.  The cake is not out on display, I'm afraid that people will laugh at it, so it’s hidden under foil in my fridge  -  if you’d like some please say

Cakewalk of Shame

Last week I did the 'halfway outfit test'  this involves trying on the 'test' dress. If it won't quite zip up, it means that less than half my clothes currently fit me,  last week the dress actually laughed at me and refused to get past my waist. 

The night after the frock humiliation, my dreams mingled the cake/body angst together -  I visited Claridges for afternoon tea. The waiter arrived and fastened the cakes directly onto my body, I left for a job interview wearing a meringue on one breast, a cupcake on the other and jangling as I walked in a skirt of chocolate fingers.

Who Ate All The Pies?

Lisbon is lovely but I headed straight out to Belem where the world-famous-best-ever Portuguese custard pies are made. This turned out to be the world's biggest cake-eating palace, as well as all the almond cakes, rice cakes, meringues and gateaux made here, 12,000 custard pies are baked and eaten daily in a cafe that can seat 2,000 cake-eaters.

Snapshot Of My Life

Several weeks ago I made some calls ...



... images of tumbleweed ... time passing ...

Party Time

The new offices have separated the Cake Eaters from the Camera Boys. The former occupy the large beautiful-ceiling-room and mostly spend time looking at hot men on each others computer screens. The Camera Boys bob in and out of their rooms like meercats investigating new burrows, they carry bits of wire or a metal box as they go but basically they’re just visiting each other to look at pictures of hot girls on each others computer screens.

Last month we all went out together. It was a straight-from-work-fancy-dinner event, an industry-award-ceremony affair where we sat at big round tables set with white linen, long-stemmed wine glasses and packets of sweeties stamped with the logo of a television company. We brought our geary clothes to work and hung them on behind-the-door-hooks until tea-time, then one by one people disappeared and reappeared to stand around feeling vaguely uncomfortable in suits and gowns until a critical mass of gloriousness was reached and just one cardigan-clad person remained tapping furiously at her keyboard.

More Food

The Golden Pudding Cupboard stands at one end of the dining room - a glass case full of sari-coloured sweets.





















Meanwhile in town ... I spy the creeping influence of franchise eating.

Fire And Cake

It seems that we were hit by some kind of storm last week; the film crew arrived back from Arizona, frantically unpacked, repacked, people came and went with bits of engineering, repaired computers and reformatted batches of hard drives

the fridge was emptied.




At 4am this morning we hauled cases out to a vehicle for the trip back to Africa.

I’m standing among the debris of abandoned bundles of cables and surplus wads of packing – I have the stupified look of a cartoon animal that a train just ran over but it hasn’t realised yet.

On the bright side a lovely New Boy has come to work with me and Miss Whiplash

He makes cake

Today he arrived at 9am accompanied by a strawberry sponge and whipped cream

I might recover

Desperately seeking ants

20th August
On the filming front - we need ants, Wood Ants in particular and something we thought would be common around here, we've been searching - they are not. Wood ants are a large species which makes them easier to film and they make nice visible nests out of pine needles. You can buy ants online, someone will send a starter colony that you can set up where you like and we will be doing this with other species over the winter but right now we need a well established colony.

There’s an abundance of fruit ripening here now, so I've been busy preserving. I gathered green walnuts for pickling back in June but despite consulting Jane Grigson on the matter my pickled walnuts are inedibley salty, I think I went wrong on the measuring side of things. I’ve now also bottled and jammed plums, made pear tarts and tried out various cakes using fruit. It was M. Bontette’s birthday recently so I popped round with one of my creations (will I ever stop torturing these people?). Mme B commented afterwards with words to the effect that it was quite a ‘ribsticker’, a quality one might not be looking for in a summer cake.