Sweet and Soggy

With a puppy in the house dead set on chewing everything in sight, I am quite keen for bedroom doors to be kept closed and things put away out of reach of inquisitive little jaws. 

Marcia did the fuel run yesterday afternoon.  Alex likes fuel runs because there is a little café at the petrol station where one can buy quite passable sticky buns.  Alex had, for whatever reason (children really do not have to try that hard) incurred his mother's wrath earlier on so when he leapt off his chair clearly wanting to accompany her (he never asks if he can 'go' with you, he asks if he can 'accompany' you) she stopped short of a refusal but did tell him to make sure he brought his own money as she would not be buying him a cake.  Naturally, the lad was a little crestfallen as, being only six, he's not in salaried employment yet so I motioned him over (I was busy trying to adjust the saddle of my bike at the time) and In-between overloud instructions to, 'Hold the bike steady for me, Son!' and ‘He won’t be long, Marcia!' I passed him a few hundred Kwanzas, told him to stick them in his pocket and when he and his mother arrived at the petrol station, to shoot into the café and buy himself a cake.  While he was at it, I said, he could buy me one as well.

The fuel we buy for the generator is shit.  Well it's mostly diesel but it's full of shit, so in addition to the fuel filter one normally finds fitted to a diesel engine, I have a Separ filter.  This contains a washable membrane that filters down to 60 microns which, as the man from Separ UK said on the phone when I ordered it, is pretty bloody small.  It also has a separator to get rid of the water.  Note I did not say get rid of 'any' water, I said get rid of 'the' water because a good percentage of it is water.  Although I only service the generator every couple of hundred hours, if I have the opportunity, I whip the Separ apart and clean it.  I was doing this when Marcia and Alex returned with the fuel.  They went into the cottage and I finished off.  Naturally, I forgot all about my sticky bun.

Much later a gnawing emptiness reminded me of the bun I hadn’t seen, let alone eaten.  Now that I am determined to get my weight down to something less than portly I shouldn’t really be eating cakes but with all this exercise I am getting, one every now and then couldn’t hurt.

‘Did you buy me a cake, Alex?’

‘Mummy has it’

‘Marcia!  Where’s my cake?’

‘I left it on the chair…’

Which chair she didn’t say but it didn’t matter, any of our chairs are within Rocky’s reach.  Fortunately, Rocky was more interested in shredding a brown paper bag than eating the patisserie therein so it wasn’t too badly masticated when I retrieved it.

I showed the bag to Alex.

‘Do you want to eat it?’ I asked him.  It was a rhetorical question but we haven’t got onto such devices in his studies yet.

He politely declined.

Marcia was changing in the bedroom.  ‘Do you want this cake?’ I asked her.  This wasn’t a rhetorical question, this was malice aforethought.

‘Doesn’t Alex want it?’

‘No, Marcia, not now that Rocky has chewed it.’

She stuck her head round the door, ‘and if I’d said I wanted it?’ she asked eyeing the soggy bag.

‘I’d have let you eat it and told you afterwards’

About three this morning I woke up with a mad craving for sugar.  There was nothing to satisfy it, no biscuits, no choccy bars, nothing.  On the dining table lay Rocky’s paper bag.  Under torch light the cake didn’t look that bad.  So I ate it.

Sorry Rocky, you had your chance