When you greatly dislike black treacle and have a moderate-to-high aversion to ginger you just have to question what you are doing with you life and why it is exactly that you sit on the kitchen floor for an hour and a half on a school night with your eyelids dying to call it a day and stare blankly at the oven waiting for a boatload of gingerbread cake to slowly take its shape (and that’s without even taking into consideration a prequel of flapjack incidents and ingredient crises and creativity crises and identity crises, the prospect of a cooling time a stone’s throw to eternity, four entire moons before you even get to slice the thing – it’s got to be STICKY, and the sudden urge to sack it all off and never mind the tooth decay, peacefully suck on the container of golden syrup that is invitingly sitting in front of you like you do on a baby’s bottle).
I don’t think I can find an answer to these
questions and I most definitely don’t need a slab of vegan Parkin to come to
the conclusion that I don’t know what I’m doing with my life; but what I do
know is that as soon as I munched my way through the first of one too many
squares of this soft spongy cake, this revelation made its sticky way to me –
that catastrophes are source of the best stories; that solitude leads to
adventures, bear-shaped brioche buns and good night’s sleep; that nine-to-five
jobs cater for sunshiny Daves and little lions (and sponsor phone calls to
them), and film cameras for lifetime accomplices; and that if you tie yourself
to someone’s balloon and let it go, just before it bursts you get to touch the
clouds and they feel like candy floss. And that, if from horrid treacle and soapy
ginger comes heavenly Parkin, there’s got to be room for hope.
