Cake or Death
Authors: Heather Mallick
ALSO BY HEATHER MALLICK
Pearls in Vinegar: The Pillow Book of Heather Mallick
For my beloved, Stephen Petherbridge
,
on whom I rely
,
and
for Jennifer Allford
,
the beautiful, the indomitable one
.
“Planet Earth is an angry place; a searing bauble of rage. All this fury, roaring round the ether—and where does it go? The answer is it simply dissipates, flitters up toward the clouds, where it hangs around making pigeons sick and causing thunderstorms. Not good enough. We’ve got to work out a way of harnessing all this spare rage and using it to power our kettles. Come on, science. Hurry up. You wouldn’t like us when we’re angry.”
—Journalist Charlie Brooker getting impatient,
The Guardian
, 2006
“Life, she thought, is sometimes sad and often dull, but there are currants in the cake and here is one of them.”
—from
The Pursuit of Love
, by Nancy Mitford, 1945
You Can Check In Any Time You Like
Urban versus Rural: Urban Wins
Here, for your perusalment and enjoyage, is a collection of nice, shiny, all-new essays (for such was the insistence of my editor). I felt my older essays had mellowed and wised up—or is it wizened?—and were ready for drinking now. He thought not. Fine. Since when has a bottle of wine been left to age at my house anyway?
The reason I wanted to stick with my aging writing was that we live in awful times. Cruelty and stupidity flourish. We will look back on them with distaste, or
worse, with nostalgia. So skip this era, I thought. It was not to be.
You’ll detect some eccentricity, healthy I hope, nothing to frighten the horses, but an air of oddity, of slight unhingement. We Canadians are a stolid people, well-behaved to a fault. But I believe humans are all extraordinarily odd, and that’s interesting. In life and in prose, it’s good to inject a little strange.
I didn’t come up with the title until long after Knopf had the
new! young! lustrous!
essays in its hands, and I can’t claim it’s entirely original. The choice between patisseries and the choir everlasting has long been a theme of British comedy, and British comedy has kept me going through the darker bits. I was watching a lot of Eddie Izzard stand-up comedy during a recent, fairly grim phase, and on
Dress to Kill
, he was talking bollocks, as he would put it, about how the Church of England wouldn’t really be able to do fundamentalism with the élan of the Cathols, the Muslims, the more
excitable
religions. A Torquemada, for instance, would offer heretics painful death, no options. But the Vicar of Bray would offer fair-minded alternatives—death, or cake with a nice cup of tea.
Naturally, everyone would choose cake, and then the vicar would worry that they’d run out. And the parishioners wouldn’t like it. “What, so my choice is ‘or death’?” a lady dressed in a herbaceous border would say indignantly. “Well then, I’ll have the chicken, please.”
It’s an eccentric set of alternatives, but an apt metaphor. For all that we are told that we lucky few in the
First World have infinite choice—in life itself, not to mention in track shoes and facial tissue—the choices are really quite stark. You have to figure out what life is, what your stance is on it and what version of yourself you find bearable. But you can see life as a blasted heath, a stark, waterless, comfortless, nasty place—and still narrow your eyes and pick out bits of cake. And if you do it right, you’ll find there’s a lot of cake about, in people’s memoirs, for instance, in lovely taxes, in your own face even. Seek out things that give you pleasure; nobody else is going to do it for you.
I haven’t had great deal of cake in my life, or so an American taught by the Declaration of Independence to pursue cake would say in utter mystification. I was raised in the Scottish manner, without pleasure. You don’t accept compliments, you worry dreadfully about other people being poor (and cakeless) or treated in a way that is not nice, you feel terribly guilty about your new Gucci boots, and when you feel shamed about wanting to drag your husband to Paris when the man frankly prefers bucket-and-spade vacations, you have fits over whether you should go to Cuba. Yes, there’s sun and sand, but how could you enjoy yourself knowing that only a short distance away, the Americans were torturing prisoners in Guantanamo?
When I have insomnia and try to put myself back to sleep with fantasies of winning a billion-dollar lottery, I dream of improving
maquiladora
factories. I would prefer to close them down but I have a responsibility to my employees. So I improve conditions. There I lie till dawn
breaks, planning a new ventilation system and a green roof for my factories. In the end, I arise for a day that is less tiring than my nighttime fantasies.
At this point, I usually say, “Screw this, we’re going to Paris.” So I go and drink wine and eat
boudin
for breakfast. I don’t loll or stroll or ponder or even
fais du lèche-vitrines
, I shop in the Napoleonic fashion—I must have this, and I must have it now, although it is very cold on the way to Moscow and I will die but still—and I throw myself into pleasure. As the essayist Nora Ephron puts it, do you splurge or do you hoard? I do both, with much angst. I love my husband—whom I chose instantly out of the very sorry lineup that is men—I love my girls, I live for books and friends, and the world is so full of a number of things, from cabbages to kings, all of it within my reach.
You’ll think the book has little to do with cake, but you would be wrong. Clearly, the essays are mostly slanted on the side of death, but may I say that the last one is a real piece of cake. So there. You can splurge
and
hoard. You can enjoy
and
give plentifully to others. You can choose cake
and
death.
Why we clean, an essay to grease the elbows
I am so bloody depressed. And the awful thing about it is that gloom used to be something to be ashamed of. I was very good at being ashamed of it and had a variety of slogans to use as cricket bats on my head. “Just get on with it” was one. “Mustn’t grumble” was another. Until I realized that I was earning a fine income doing just that, that is, writing newspaper columns that were essentially me grumbling for 850 words every week. “Just do it” was very good, the only thing for which Nike deserves credit.