This afternoon I arrived home from a heartening meeting to sit with my children as they devoured Spaghetti Bolognese around the table.
And the conversation flowed.
It trickled around the subject of Daddy, who stoically refuses an extra crispbread with the air of a monastic cleric during the day, yet devours virtually whole home-made cakes as the day draws to its close.
Maddie makes sponge cakes to die for, topped with butter icing and chocolate buttons. And she and her brother have noticed that while slices disappear at a moderate pace in the waking hours, whole cakes can disappear under cover of darkness.
“It goes like this,” Maddie tells me, twirling her spaghetti. “It gets late and it’s time to go to bed, and I hear you both get ready, and Daddy disappears downstairs to make the last cup of tea.
“The thing is, he’s gone for a very long time. And I think he eats all the cake then, while no-one is looking.”
The evidence to support Maddie’s theory is all highly circumstantial. No-one sees Phil vamoose huge wedges of cake. We know simply that he is the only one who dawdles in the kitchen after ten pm, and that the cake has done a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t magic trick.
It could be the cat: she has the attitude. In fact her slightly insane tortoiseshell glare would melt a fridge door at five kitty paces.
But the door remains steadfastly solid the morning after. So it’s not the cat.
It could be the dog: his dissatisfaction with doggy chow, and propensity to thieve are well documented in the cyberpages of the Shrewsday chronicles.
But Macaulay has no opposable thumbs with which to open a fridge, and his little legs are rather short to access the waist-high appliance.
The evidence, if evidence there be, will show everywhere but on the girth of my beloved. He loves nothing more than a five-mile run, in the City or in the forest.
My daughter is less enchanted with running. Today, the conversation trickled on to the new PE teacher at school. She has the attitude of a Spartan commander, Maddie’s version of events relates. Today, before ten of the clock, she and her fellow scholars were in their PE kits and pounding the streets of the leafy university district of one of our southern market towns.
There was no mercy, it seems. The teacher had one volume and that was Very Loud, and one word and that was Faster.
Thinking of the luscious sponge cake in the fridge, I uttered a silent prayer of thanks to this Spartan soul.” Maddie,” I said, “PE teachers are all like that. For forty minutes, three times a week, This Is Sparta.”
My physical education teachers came from the same mould as those long-dead military hard nuts.. Their money was not prissy coinage, but iron bars. They never built great monuments: rather, they built low barracksy villages, utilitarian and bare.
If you survived your baby bath of wine and the gruelling physical set by the Gerousia you started your military training at seven. They were deliberately underfed to encourage the stealing of food.
Hard men of history? You have no idea.
But, like my husband, stoic forbearance was not a 24-hour business.
Because they, too had a feast. It was called a pheditia, a name thought to come from the words ‘love feast.’
It consisted of a first course of black broth, a mix of boiled pigs legs, pork , blood and vinegar. And it continued with ‘afters’: fruit, game, poultry and other delicacies.
And for a people who eschewed the excess of comforts, it is interesting to note that their decision-making process – the voting system to elect someone to join their ‘mess’ – is one centred around food.
Plutarch, in his Life of Lycurgus, writes: “each man in the company took a little ball of soft bread, which they were to throw into a deep basin, which a waiter carried round upon his head; those that liked the person to be chosen dropped their ball into the basin without altering its figure, and those who disliked him pressed it between their fingers, and made it flat; and this signified as much as a negative voice.
“And if there were but one of these pieces in the basin, the suitor was rejected, so desirous were they that all the members of the company should be agreeable to each other.”
So there you have it. This army still travelled on its stomach.
The little treats have always been there. Today it’s a sponge cake; then, a juicy piece of game or fruit or poultry.
The Spartan male runs a stoic life indeed, refusing all comforts in daylight.
But come the darkness, it’s time for feasting.
Kate Shrewsday 
Poor Phil – imagine his secret pleasure has now been revealed to the world!
Hmm . . .
I suspect Kate as the culprit in the Case of the Missing Cake. 😆
She’s just tossing poor Phil into the hopper (with the cat and the dog, no less) to throw us off the scent. She knows that the best defense is a good offense (probably from watching starving Spartan warriors).
Relying on her Mirror Neurons, she learned to emulate their trickery and treachery in casting aspersions in an ever increasing circle.
Nancy! What an idea *giggle*
LOL
You’ve rumbled me, Nancy. They call me Kate ‘Sponge Cake’ Shrewsday.
S’ok, Rosemary, he reads posts before I post tham and has the power of sanction. His good nature on the whole cake-snaffling thing does him credit 🙂
If he is a teacher, he probably doesn’t get much time to think about food during the day. When I was teaching I was exactly the same. I wasn’t a PE teacher though! They just gave me a classroom miles and miles from the staffroom!
He’s a journalist, Lynley…now working for a great big bank which has lunch meetings and the leftovers of other people’s lunch meetings. He eats like a banker 😀
All jesting and joshing aside, I loved this:
“It goes like this,” Maddie tells me, twirling her spaghetti. “It gets late and it’s time to o to bed, and I hear you both get ready for bed, and Daddy disappears downstairs to make the last cup of tea. [~ go]
“The thing is, he’s gone for a very long time. And I think he eats all the cake then, while no-one is looking.”
The evidence to support Maddie’s theory is all highly circumstantial. No-one sees Phil vamousse huge wedges of cake. We know simply that he is the only one who dawdles in the kitchen after ten pm, and that the cake has done a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t magic trick.
Cheers, Nancy 😀
I’m wondering, now, if it isn’t Phil who has been eating the shortbread I made yesterday. There was a full recipe yesterday. Neat squares of buttery goodness. Now? Mere crumbs. Couldn’t be me, my ancestors hail from Sparta. Hmmm? I was up rather late last night.
😀 We will never know, Penny…..
I have a question. Do you think it could be Phil who sneaks into my kitchen cupboard and eats the biscuits? I can’t imagine who else it could be.
Definitely, Sidey.
I don’t think I tool anything in past ‘Maddie makes sponge cakes to die for, topped with butter icing and chocolate buttons.’
Wanna swap kids?
😀 Think I might just hold onto this one, Tilly. Not sure how I’d manage without sponge cakes…
“Physical education teachers came from the same mould” – the world over, Kate – I still remember Mrs Shaw’s Scottish yelling 3+ decades on from primary school. And my tap teacher’s day job was as lieutenant colonel in the army – she was simply terrifying
😀 It was Sparta, BB…
Well, if Phil eats all the cake and runs it all off then I wouldn’t be upset. If he didn’t run it off and went all podgy THEN you’d have every reason to…
He is a lean mean running machine, Denise. However the children’s packed lunches look a little sparse the day after a raid.
Now, I am craving sponge cake or some delightful and impossible-to-procure-here English biscuits. Do you think if I left sponge cake in my kitchen, Phil would sneak in and trade me?
Hi Andra! Thanks so much for coming over: Phil will sniff out sponge cake anywhere, anytime. Maddie does a nice line on shortbread too…so we’ll be over for a cup of tea presently.
😀 Great post – my DH is just the same, he too makes last tea and always comes upstairs with his jaws still moving, funny that! Aren’t all PE teachers just the same ;-( mine was a real harridan and hence PE was the most dreaded time of the week, give me a hockey stick and a nice green pitch anyday!
Ah, now there we differ, Friend – I used to position myself in the goal of the winning hockey team with two henchmen as goal defence. We used to set the world to rights while the game was raging the other end of the pitch 😀
IN our house its Scout who is the main culprit. Fig rolls and Garibaldis disappear. (I hide the chocolate biscuits -b ut he usually finds them after a while)
😀 Sounds extremely familiar, Pseu….and I bet he works it all off cycling, too…
No, Scout won’t cycle….. just Judo!
Kate, have you considered that you might be a sleepwalker/eater? If you’ve evidence to the contrary, then circumstantial evidence does indeed point to Phil.
*Shuffles feet and looks shiftily at floor* PiedType, I fear I had not even considered this possibility. I’m about to download that iPhone app where you can record your sleeping activity. If I hear myself get up; or indeed, catch the sound of a sponge cake being devoured by someone patently female: why, then I shall offer a full and frank retraction 😀
*blinding halo* I never attack cakes late at night. Well, hardly ever.
Chocolate, peanuts and raisins, separately or combined, are a different matter entirely. They don’t count.
I would be hard put to it to ignore such a nocturnal feast, Col 😀
Ah, cakes. Ugh, PE teachers… Eating and sport. One, I’ve always been very good at, the other, completely useless. Bet you can’t guess which? 😉
And I, Tom, am just the same….
Oh dear, another similarity! I recognise this late night eating too……..
😀 I think it might be universal….