The Cake-Eating Academical

It was Hodmandod Minor's birthday so we decided to take him a cake I'd made


and then went for a short walk under a sky like polished pewter


in Morcambe Bay.


There is a bleak romance about the coast in winter;


a piquant. soul-soaring emptiness.

Hodmandod Minor is twenty and at university. He is the sort of person that is happy alone.


We remembered today that he was a small thin scrap of a baby when he was born; but soon filled out to be the sort that would wake smiling in his cot


and jump up and down with a gurgling grin at the thought of being plucked out.


He still likes cake.