Elbows & Cakes

 I’ve never been able to make cake. My father, however, was a dab hand at it. He always called it Welsh cake, with him being Welsh, I guess. He has passed on now to where cakes welcome new tenants onto Heaven’s hillside, cakes forever made, forever eaten, a constant cake, a cake cake, in fact. Let them eat cake, sing the angels. And God has let it be so. And there I leave my father in his land of the fathers.

But others of us pass onto a different hillside, a different lower case heaven, but still it‘s one with constant cake, and most after-lives are tantamount to being  cake, a perceived spirituality, one based on a faith in cake-ism. Each of us an ingredient in the great big mixing-bowl, trickled down into it as a would-be trickle-treat that some mistakenly believe is upper case Heaven. This being the place where angels, with no known gender, mix and mingle within the flow of eggs, flour and whatever else entails growing a cake, but each passer-on brings one extra ingredient to the so-called cake, a cake that often seems impossible for us to eat and even eats us! A cake of no known gender, sifting our eggs, grating our tubes, into one composite cake of angels. Layers of battenburg with soul-fluids between — a wondrous massive mix, with skin peel and lots of loving. 

I suddenly stopped day-dreaming. It is peculiar what the word ‘cake’ has evoked in my mind. Told to write about cake, this is what I have written. I had been forced to write about cake by some duplicitous writer’s group to write quickly, smartly, without prior thought, using the upper case title of Cake. A proper Proustian cake, I hoped it would be. But parts of me, I am now starting to disown, the moving joints and other elbows of my body joining together as one, more a meatloaf than a cake, a dream of melted consistency and baked log, oozings of cream along with pangs of love-sweetened lust. A huge panoply of trussed existence that only being cooked by some power source of this lower case heaven can produce, it being a culinary process triggered by death, a rationale for eerie ghosts as well as enviable spirits. Globs of jammy substance, still trickling down, trickling down, having once corroded the living veins with hot-flush prostate tissuing, and then interleaved with dark brown chocolate cushions, or at least I hoped it was chocolate. Bony ribs were ground down for the meatier logs intended for those who prefer the savoury rather than the unsavoury, but somehow that does not sound quite right, and I wish to edit that bit if I ever live long enough to publish this snap-judgement flash creative work. Minced body-middles to make the consistency softer and more al dente at the same time. A lava bread, a loofah, a sponge, a trifle, even a proper fruit flan for the all night pudding party of the soul …. if only I could go back to change things and to help everyone who are still alive to trickle up instead of trickle down. 

Yup yup, I can now see a mighty mountainous ever-lasting never-ending whoopee whopper of a, yup yup yup, superbly prehensile upper-case Angel Cake with elbows like me. Indeed, I often had problems with my elbows, not both at once, but each separately, as if they took it in turns to irritate me. Not pain like arthritis but more a sense they were alive, separate thinking beings colluding to frustrate anything I  wanted to do. Their thoughts hurt somewhat, however, their mental machinations simulating bones grinding and cakes baking.

I was tested to the limits, unable to mention this to anyone for fear of them thinking me mad. I speculated on obtaining professional advice, but from where? A GP or a shrink? Or even a religious person of some sort? You were certainly out of the question, in fact the last person to consult. 

I  tried googling the word ‘elbow’ along with some of my symptoms, as people had increasingly become prone to self-diagnosis following the onset of the internet. And people did indeed become subject to the strangest maladies, some quite surreal as a result of their searches. Mostly in their heads. And that is where I firmly placed the symptoms of my malady — in my head!

But such googling did also elicit much obscure information about elbows, such as their use in literature, poems and stories and novels, and, also, cakes. For example, the 20th century fiction writer Elizabeth Bowen had recently been found to use them quite effectively, and that, some thought, was because of her name… The EL of her forename and the BOW of her surname. Or was that a coincidence?

The elbow paths on which the internet took me often ended up with details about coincidences; how people instinctively used coincidences as cushions when tested to the limits of their own fallible humanity and the otherwise randomness of life. Not that they consciously thought about it. These were factors and mansion machinations not within their heads but within their bodies. And for elbows, please read knees, in some folk. But rarely wrists or waists. Never ankles or knuckles. Mostly elbows, it has to be said. But what about the finger-joints, I suddenly find myself asking, as I use them to knead the pastry for a pie?

Well, my story is a complicated one, so I shall simplify it. By ending it here. Other than to inform you that the mindless finger-joints seem to have become part of some conspiracy to test my limits of intellect and will-power. And so this story using elbows as metaphors indeed was forced to end there. Because I have no Voice App on my computer, and, what is more, the fingers have just elbowed me out of consciousness altogether by strangling my neck and they seem to be typing something else.

And so I fully recovered without any memory of what was already told and I  now happily plays tennis most of the time. And we should continue knocking our covered elbows together in covid’s memory, I feel, rather than the mere shaking of hands. Lockdown in a mansion with chocolate cushions is so much more bearable than squatting in a small bedsit with bedbugs in the blankets like raisins and currants.

”….standing up very straight to cut the cake, was like a doll stitched upright into its box, apt, if you should cut the string at its back, to pitch right forward and break its delicate fingers.” — ELizabeth BOWen