Mallick - Cake or death: the excruciating choices of everyday life

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.

Contents

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 upor 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.

Youll 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 thats interesting. In life and in prose, its good to inject a little strange.

I didnt come up with the title until long after Knopf had the new! young! lustrous! essays in its hands, and I cant claim its 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 wouldnt really be able to do fundamentalism with the lan 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 alternativesdeath, or cake with a nice cup of tea.

Naturally, everyone would choose cake, and then the vicar would worry that theyd run out. And the parishioners wouldnt like it. What, so my choice is or death? a lady dressed in a herbaceous border would say indignantly. Well then, Ill have the chicken, please.

Its 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 choicein life itself, not to mention in track shoes and facial tissuethe 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 placeand still narrow your eyes and pick out bits of cake. And if you do it right, youll find theres a lot of cake about, in peoples 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 havent 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 dont 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, theres 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, were going to Paris. So I go and drink wine and eat boudin for breakfast. I dont loll or stroll or ponder or even fais du lche-vitrines, I shop in the Napoleonic fashionI must have this, and I must have it now, although it is very cold on the way to Moscow and I will die but stilland 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 husbandwhom I chose instantly out of the very sorry lineup that is menI 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.

Youll 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.

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. Mustnt 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.

But the slogans dont work any more. Stephen Fry once wrote that just as they have laugh tracks on television comedies, so should they have weeping tracks on the news. And he wrote that during the