October 2011
1 post
We have moved!
If you would like to read more or take part in The Great Cake* Experiment, you’ll find our new home is just over here. Do come visit, we’ve made tea especially.
August 2011
10 posts
End of Round One
The winner of the first ever round of The Great Cake* Experiment was:
Elaine Doyle (www.thedragontrack.com)
Congratulations to Elaine, and to all the incredibly talented writers that took part. We’ll be back here in November for Round Two!
Happy Endings
My mother loves films with sad endings. The double suicide, the abortion gone wrong, the terrible decision that leads to an inescapable, unhappy marriage or a life of quiet, unfulfilled desperation. She spurns the typical Hollywood movie with its tacked on, cheerful resolution and deliberately seeks out obscure, slow-paced Chinese and Russian dramas, where the only way you can tell the movie...
Happy Endings
There are long, long stretches of road here. Sometimes the only punctuation is the sign for a happy endings massage parlor or the crackling through of Christian talk radio. I’m not a Christian, but I like listening to Christian talk radio. Just the same: I’ve never had a happily ending, or any other kind of, massage, but I like looking at the signs.
I drive a great deal. I have...
Happy Endings
She was grateful for the shoes, but it wasn’t really her style. She hadn’t chosen them for herself, after all; her family had thrust them upon her, but it wasn’t a version of herself that she recognised. She thanked him for his attention, gently – but firmly – steered him towards the door, and went back inside. She would make her own life, out of the cinders of the old. No shoes – however...
1 tag
Happy Endings.
His face reddened with barely contained fury, Klaus stormed in to the cottage, leaving the front door open, and looked around for something to throw. His eye lighted on a smallish vase which he scooped up and, in one motion, flung to the floor where it shattered in to pieces. Ben looked up, an eyebrow arching over the top of his spectacles. Klaus met his gaze and held his hands out, his body...
The Great Cake* Experiment, Week 12: Happy Endings
I went to a work colleague’s wedding last weekend. It was a huge, lovely affair, with well over 200 guests. When I arrived for the post-dinner party, almost half the invited guests were on the dancefloor giving it their all to the backdrop of funky Afro-beats. I was quick to join them.
Near the end of the evening, came the inevitable throwing of the bouquet. The bride wrenched the...
Happy endings
There is no such thing as an amicable break-up.
I’ve heard the same glossy phrases uttered dozens of times by optimistic friends. Bathed in the glow of relief, safe in the knowledge that a battle was avoided. ‘It was mutual… It was pleasant… We’re happier as friends’. But in the months that follow, those sweet words turn bitter. There’s a sticky residue...
A Happy Ending
Krung adjusted the breathing apparatus, knowing full well that no matter how much he fiddled it would never fit properly. Well, properly enough that he could still breathe but not enough for it to feel a part of him rather than a hindrance. But it wasn’t a surprise that it didn’t and couldn’t fit. After all, this was his father’s space ship, the XR-949. A ship designed specifically for his...
Tall Green Grass of Home
There’s a whole mess o’ trouble at the Choctaw Hill / Your sister didn’t make it but I bet you will The world is a blanket of green, stretching to the horizon. Vicky pegs it down the gentle slope, towards the backyard of her family home: wide, broad, and on the other side of the tributary. Behind her, a rumbling crackle breaks the quiet of the plains. She can see Nicola,...
Week 11: While the music lasts
July 2011
45 posts
While the Music Lasts
There is a man without memory, and a woman who loves him. Somewhere, a line got broken. In his mind, the pause before the drop: everything is suspended. He cannot remember his name. He cannot remember five minutes ago, or five hours, or five days. But he remembers that he loves her. When the storm arrived, everything was thrown overboard. The lines tense and strain, and the boards shout in...
While the music lasts...
Like pretty much most people I know, my existence to date has been accompanied by a vast and varied soundtrack. For each memory, a musical cue, for every tear, a tune. For every heartbursting moment of happiness, a matching chariots-of-fire-esque musical crescendo. Every song, every guitar riff or piano intro capable of transporting me back instantly to a defining – or utterly mundane – moment...
1 tag
While the Music Lasts
I have little time until it returns. Time enough, I hope, for me to write down what needs to be written, so that this story will survive this endless night even if I do not. Sarah is gone. I must set it all down while I still have light and memory. I pray they leave me time and sanity enough to finish. I must explain how all of this happened, if only so that I have at least my record. So that I...
While the Music Lasts
While the music lasts, I don’t need to make conversation. We can simply be - we don’t need to address the argument, the lying, the cheating, the fallout, the breakup that must come, now. The way he placed his lips on hers, came home, looked me in the eye, placed his lips on mine. The way he slept next to me night after night. The way he did so much more than that. We’re at...
While the music lasts...
Grand plans to write Part 2 of Miss McAllister’s adventures for this week have been put on hold due to motherly duties. As a result my contribution to all things ‘Great Cake’ and ‘Experimental’ shall be brief and from my slightly cringe-worthy memories of teenagedom.
I went to an all girls’ boarding school, so you can imagine that by about 15 or 16 I was probably – along with my peers - a...
A Night On the Sofa
London, I often say, is a city defined by hundreds of small villages that it slowly took over. In the North, you have the example of the former country residence of London’s upper classes, Highgate. A wonderful town feel still remains here, as does the famous cemetery housing Karl Marx’s grave. You can ignore the traffic noise of the Archway road as it turns into the A1, the start of...
Great Cake* Experiment Week 11: while the music...
Music’s always been quite a big part of my life. I distinctly remember listening to music in the car with my dad when I was young. Mum didn’t like the radio up loud so we would wait until she wasn’t in the car and then blast it. Holidays from my youth are punctuated with songs. We didn’t have very much money so holidays were almost always within short driving distance. Turn...
While the music lasts
Sometimes I love a piece of music, and it’s magical. There are songs out there that reach past my cynicism and make me feel something new. It’s surprising, exciting and joyful; it feels a lot like falling for a girl. I wonder what my friends will think, and worry that I won’t be able to stand the rest of the discography.
But the same notes played in the same order can’t...
Week 10: A friend indeed
A Friend Indeed
A friend doesn’t let another friend be killed by a cylon. Forget Charlie Brown, forget fortune cookies, forget magic eight balls or priests or your human philosophies. I know the meaning of friendship. No cylons. Nyet. Never.
Tonight, Kevin killed us all. The filthy rotten robot-lover. He rolled the dice, and with a casual flick of card, and push of some flimsy plastic playing pieces, he...
Fond Friends Forever
Once, a long time ago, when Kylie loved Jason, I loved Kylie, Snickers bars were still called Marathons and everyone’s biggest ambition was to own a Walkman, I made a friend. We sat beside each other in the back row of first class, sharing confidences, feet in white ankle socks swinging a few inches above the ground. I learned that her dog got sick in the kitchen last night, and her dad shouted at...
A friend indeed
I’m currently curled up in bed, alternately comforted by the warmth of my softest blanket and stifled by its heat. It’s flu season, and I was just ripe for the picking.
It’s been six days since I first woke up, wondering if I had in fact died in the night and was hauling my own corpse from bedroom to bathroom. By day five of this ridiculous virus, my brain decided that to pass...
On friendship
The older you get, the harder it is to connect. When you’re a kid, you share so many of the same experiences and views as your peers that it’d be bizarre if you didn’t make friends. There’s bound to be someone else in the class who supports your footy team.1 But we diverge and crystallise like snowflakes from a cloud, and our combination of genes and memories grows weirder and more distinct every...
On the Importance of Hydration
Waking up on crumpled bedsheets, Nick reached up for the pint of water. It’s morning, at least by his body’s standards, though in the kitchen I am stir-frying rice for lunch. The water is necessary - not only did he go out last night, but he also came back this morning, fairly uncertain on his feet. He pulls out an A-Team DVD from the shelf (accessible from the bed), plugs in his...
A friend indeed..
To say I’m quite busy at work at the minute is, I am confident in saying, quite the underestimate. I put in about 15 hours unpaid overtime last week, worked my arms into an RSI frenzy, ate lunch at my desk whilst reading and writing email, and compiled urgent list after urgent list on the train every morning. From about 2.30pm on the Monday I was already longingly casting my imagination...
A Friend in Deed
When I was almost 27, I had to move to San Francisco to get medical treatment for a nerve problem in my pelvic region. I was 3,000 miles from home, alone, and in a great deal of pain and distress. I was unable to sit, and even going for long walks was mostly out of the question. I lived in a hotel with a fairly lax cleaning policy near a “full release” massage parlor, in an area...
A friend indeed
“A friend? Indeed…” said Miss McAllister.
She looked at the man her foppish nephew, Juan Arnold, had introduced as ‘Mr Tuesday’. Grey flannel suit. Large spectacles. Long fingers that were intriguingly still. A plain face. He certainly looked the part of a forensic accountant, but was this truly the man to save her empire?
For seventy-five year old Miss McAllister - of 43 Tracklemead...
Week 9: Town & Country
Town and country
There’s a Bill Callahan song in which his protagonist worries about not being able to change: “Whenever I get dressed up, I feel like an ex-con trying to make good.” Only that’s not how it’s sung. It has important pauses, so important, in fact, that you might be tempted to say caesuras, not pauses, since the word “pauses” itself has insufficient pausal value.
Imagine Van...
Town (or Rather, City) and Country
The year I turned nine years old, the group Starship released their number one hit “We Built This City (On Rock and Roll).” You deserve to be forewarned, if you haven’t heard this song already, that this is an awesomely, an epically bad song. It is, in fact, such a bad song that Blender magazine once ranked it as “the worst song ever” and countless clever and...
Town and Country
My grandmother was a country woman. If you were to add it up, she spent – by far – the majority of her life in towns and cities: in places of grey, and concrete, and brick. But somehow, that first decade counted the most. It shaped her, as much as anyone is ever shaped. It shaped her speech. Long after she left her small village, she carried pieces of it with her, in the bends and turn of a...
Town and Country...
When I was 16, the gap in my mind between town and country was at its greatest. Living in the country, in what felt like hundreds of miles from “civilisation” (in reality, just 4.1) with the only means of available transport the passenger seat of an unwilling parent, or the rickety wheels of an ancient pushbike, “town” was the holy grail. Having a bunch of town friends didn’t help. How my best...
Town and Country
The women in the fields told a story of the Girl Who Ran. They said that one day she stood up and straightened her back, people turning at the noise of her joints cracking. She looked out over the fields and then ran as fast and as far as she could, through the fields and over the hill and away and on. She found a way to board a transport, found a way to bribe a guard or a passenger and slipped...
City and Country
Whenever I visit the countryside there’s a part of me that wants to stay there, and leave the office job, tiny apartment and morning commute for the suckers back in the city. The serenity, the beauty, the slow pace: they’re seductive, alright.
I was up in the Lakes District a few weeks ago, and I saw a cottage to let for less than half the price of what I currently pay in London. It...
Imbalanced
Outside of my window, in the damp cool of the English high summer, there is a tree with dark leaves. As you round the church with the crumbled brick wall and straighten onto our road, the tree catches your vision on the left, a deep red-blue shadow to my colour-broken eyes. The branches and leaves are thick, dense, intense and block the view of the terraced houses on the other side of the street....
Town and country
I grew up in a small, rain-polished town buried in the rich green depths of Ireland - which may sound slightly more romantic and mysterious than it felt at the time. I visited cities, as a child, but I’d no real understanding of them. The people I met on the street, the time I spent there, didn’t so much blur together as… average out. The average colour was concrete. The average...
Week 8: Envy
Envy
When I was five, I cut off all my doll’s hair.
I didn’t mean to. Or rather, I didn’t fully understand. My own hair was cut that day – with gentle reassurances from my Mam that it was fine, and that it would grow back. ‘Hair grows!’ she said, gently stroking my (now mildly shorn) head. ‘It’ll be long again in no time.’
Oddly, I don’t remember cutting the doll’s hair. I know that I did so;...
Envy
I don’t know if it’s that I have a particularly vivid imagination or if it’s basic human nature, but when I see someone doing something wonderful, something incredible, I tend to take admiration to another level. I conjure up a world where I followed that same path, where I was excellent at that very same thing. I imagine having that same easy grace, one that only comes from...
Streaking Through the Skies
In the corner of my parents’ living room, there is a rattan chest of drawers filled video cassettes, balanced on top of other video cassettes. I don’t know what the collective noun for these cassettes is but presumably something dull like ‘a collection’ will work. If a ‘collection’ can span both VHS and Betamax and is allowed to encompass recordings of Inspector...
Zizek, Rawls and envy
Envy poses more than one problem for egalitarian theories of justice. One problem, the one I propose to talk about a little here, is that envy, being a deep-seated human feeling, might destroy the social arrangement that a theory has identified as the just one. (Envy carries such destructive potential, because not only does it have a benign form [perhaps motivating the improvement of...
N.V.
I hear rocks sliding and men cheering, and I turned away from the gorgeous view to see the Belgian and the Swede running and slipping down the scree. When they reach my part of the outcropping, I say g’day and nod. The Swede gives a big wave, still laughing and panting and shaking his head. The Belgian ignores me, in the same studied way he did over breakfast at the hostel this morning.
...
Envy
So many of my ideas for this project come from my nightly walks with my boyfriend Tedd. I will agonize and puzzle over the topic - “Oh! I can’t possibly write about this one!” - and he’ll make some offhand observation that makes me realize I can. This week it was “Envy…isn’t that one of the seven deadly sins?” “Yes…” I...
Envy
So, according to the dictionary on my laptop,
envy |ˈenvē|
noun ( pl. -vies)
a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck
It’s a pretty strong emotion. Occasionally I have looked at an expensive handbag on somebody else’s arm, or the lovely shoes on somebody else’s feet and possibly even someone’s private Carribean island...
1 tag
Envy.
Hi, I don’t normally go in for writing letters, but I wanted to try and settle things between us before we met in person. I imagine you’ve reached your own conclusions about what’s happened between us over the last few months, but I’d like to take this opportunity to put my side of the story down on paper. I’d like to explain and, I suppose, to apologise. First of all, though, it really has...
Precious Little Life
I tried to be a comic book geek when I was younger, I really did. Somehow, in my misguided ways, I thought that it was a cool thing to do. I obviously watched too many American import fantasy shows when I was a kid and the subliminal waves hit me hard. I tried Superman and Spiderman and even thought that the Buffy comic book tie-ins (yes, I own these and you may borrow them if you ask politely)...
(A very Irish type of) Envy
When Paddy Junior’s father died, the townspeople of Ballyhamsandwich lowered their chins slightly and cast many a sympathetic gaze upwards from beneath their furrowed eyebrows. Respect where it was due. Paddy Senior, (or Pabo as he was known in public spaces), was a fine man indeed. A weekend gambler and a friendly drunkard, he was usually (depending on how much of a cure he had taken in the...
Week 7: Wake up
Wake Up
Looking for some inspiration for this week’s topic, and not trying too hard to think outside the box, I took the obvious route and googled the phrase “Wake Up” (including Boolean operators – do people still use those?). That course of action resulted in this song circulating in my head for a few hours afterwards, which I didn’t much mind. I found...