Impotence and Cupcakes

OK, so the day didn't start well because it was only dampy-drizzly and I went in without a coat and once I'd gone too far to go back, it rained lots and I got wet and cold.

But there is a work colleague who is making my life hell. It isn't just me, others are affected, but my own head makes it worse because I'm trapped by the situation. If I stand up and lump the Problem Child in the face then I get the suspension and the angry letters from the headmaster, but if I don't, then Problem Child is the winner and will return time and time again to steal the lunch money of my life. I am not naturally pugnacious or large in stature so this all makes me feel a little helpless. It may change when we go to different schools, but that doesn't help me now. Secretly I want to be like the others that have already punched Problem Child in retaliation for similar slights but for now I'll wait.

Now, you won't know this but Xmas is coming up soon and for this, we are expected to make Xmas cakes and take them into school to be judged and resold to aid school funds, definitely a theme developing here.

It is stated in the rules and conditions that these festive cakes must be completed by a child so when Jof baked the basic cupcakes, we ensured that they looked bad enough to have plausibly been made by a child. Fortunately this happened automatically.

So she got lots of cake decorations ready and we spilt half the pot of mini shiny balls all over the floor and had great fun cutting out alleged holly leaves that looked more like dead fish and I did a Santa coming down the chimney which looked like the Eiffel Tower stuck in a tennis net and all was fun.

I did a different design for each and we added some crunchy gingerbread bears from Sainsburys with varying numbers of legs and clouds of glitter and balls and squirtles of icing in special biological shapes, and all 11 came out well enough to win the Great British Bake-off as long as all the adjudicators had been eating the wrong mushrooms again.

Then we had the leftovers problem. Primarily, gobbets of marzipan: but also a bowl of melted chocolate. We used an old trick we invented once to store millions of dead matches (when we had an old-fashioned oven) which is the over-ripe banana. We sacrificed a banana and stuck toothpicks in it to hold the chocolate marzi-balls off the surface because they stick dreadfully.

Of course, these choice titbits don't go to the school for resale. In fact, I might just say that we baked some cakes, honest Guv, but they were eaten by the dog. Also, the boilerman came and fixed the boiler in 20 minutes. Now it's so quiet you keep thinking something's missing.