incandescens | the stem ginger cake is tempting

A nice quiet day: did some cleaning, did some knitting, recuperated from the last couple of days and the, ahem, over-eating associated with same.

I seem to have two stem ginger cakes from Betty's in the kitchen. This would be because my mother determined to buy birthday cakes to take into the office with her while we were visiting York and at Betty's, and bought four: two lemon and lime, two stem ginger. She forgot that the cakes she'd gotten were the perishable iced loaf sort (as opposed to longer-lasting fruit cakes) and her birthday is mid-November, while the cakes would go over-date before the end of October. She therefore palmed one of them off on me, and was muttering about what to do with the others.

I cannot entirely object to an extra stem ginger cake from Betty's.

(The second stem ginger cake was one that I'd already got for myself. I do like the stem ginger cakes from Betty's.

---

Prayer

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade 1 piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

-- Carol Ann Duffy