Walking The Dog

Chocolate cake. Most of us who bake probably have a favourite chocolate cake recipe - the one that always works; that forgives being made in a rush or once without eggs (added to the cake tin five minutes after it was initially placed in the oven ... even I didn't think I'd get away with that one); that tolerates the fickle heat of different ovens and different tins and without fail, at first sniff of it baking, brings back delicious memories of old friends and old holidays. And picnics and sand between toes and laughter and blustery walks and holding hands and eating too much and wind in your hair and squinting in the sun and dancing in the rain and dragonflies hitching a ride and castles and hill-tops and freezing cold lochs and a long walk with a black and white cat. This is my favourite chocolate cake recipe. Written by the dearest of old friends, on this scrap of paper, over twenty years ago. (Annotated by he who should have known better and me. He was right abo

Warning : skip the next eight paragraphs or so - see  **  below - if you just want to read about dogs and parks and truths and avoid an inner ear-wagging about a Twit. Your blood pressure will thank you. The Earth may not. 'Taking with one hand and giving back with the other': is that a definition of smarmy? Especially when 'the other' hand is a smaller and substantially more smug hand. Take for example, the Twit who, while recalibrating the boundaries of smugness, reverses years of research and reason with an ill-conceived raid on the funding of environmental protection projects. Then attempts to appease for his plundering by donating some of his own money - his own salary no less - to a project that was directly and adversely affected by his earlier fiscal thievery. Or did the Twit simply not know that the two were connected? Or is this all fake news? Again. The Twit's reported raid on domestic environmental protection funding is just the start. But th