A mild digression.

New Year’s resolutions are, by and large, utterly futile. I can’t recall any that I’ve made that have crawled beyond January and that’s not just because I have all the willpower of a lady with substantial bones in a cake shop. Hey, it’s the 21st century – it could just as well be a bloke. Or a gender neutral person. It could indeed be anyone of any gender and at any point between genders – pre or post procedure – or even just weighing up their options. It might even be a 6 year old who, even at such a tender age, just knows deep down that they were born inside out and that sooner or later they’d rather have a fanny instead of a willy and also secretly quite fancy the idea of dressing up in their mother’s tights and dancing round the living room. I am so open minded you can almost see through my skull.
And let’s not forget that they might be big of thigh and neck already because they have a legitimate medical condition, like water retention or lard retention, so they don’t necessarily have to be big; they could be regular sized. Though now I’m in a bit of a cul-de-sac because we’re not really allowed to think in terms of regular anymore because in our own special, unique way we are all regular and are free to not be bound by societal expectation and the measure of historical convention. What’s regular? Who wants to be regular? They could be an anorexic who simply fancies spending the afternoon licking a choux bun into saliva-sludged submission. But then that’s being very judgemental because anorexic can’t be a pleasant thing to be, so we’ll even things out and just say a person. A person in a cake shop.
But given how bad some people are with allergies I’ll be totally understanding and make it a gluten free cake shop. After all gluten free is the way forward. Gluten free is the way of saying your diet needs to be a bit spesh. Gluten free is how it should always have been. It’s a wonder how we’ve come this far what with all the gluten we’ve be chewing away on. Just imagine where we’d be if Einstein had been gluten free. Living on Jupiter maybe? Or even in another solar system. And not just gluten free but also devoid of all ingredients that could cause a catastrophic reaction, enough of one to turn the daintiest of faces into the death mask of a fat Chinaman. A gluten, sesame seed, the entire nut family and associates, shellfish, kiwi, egg and avocado free cake shop. Note – I appreciate that will be hard since everything these days has to have a fucking avocado smashed into it from several different directions.
You know what? Let’s go the whole hog and make it a vegan cake shop because civilisation could easily have come this far and further if we’d all been vegan. Who needs breast milk? Who needs a big fat woolly mammoth steak to get them through the freezing winter. I’m convinced we could have conquered the planet perfectly well fuelled only on spinach, soy milk and quinoa. And I’m fairly sure we would have got through the last ice age without wearing the hides and furs of our kills. Yes, a matching set of hemp pajamas would have been perfectly adequate. So, a person of undetermined physical stature standing in a vegan cake shop.
Only they don’t have to be standing. They could be in a wheelchair. That would be the inclusive thing to do. Now, I’m simply not in a position to offer a conclusive reason for the wheelchair but if you’d prefer there to be a wheelchair just to make the point that some people need them then consider it done. I don’t want you to think that I don’t know that some people have disabilities and that those without should be both grateful and aware of the trials they face. Not that they need your help. I would come last at any event in the Invictus Games. And if I ever converted my small terraced house into a rave venue I would make wheelchair access my top priority.
And I suppose since we’re trying to be totally indiscriminating in an overly and needlessly obvious, 2019 kind of way, it shouldn’t necessarily be a cake shop at all. Why does cake always have to be the temptation for people who may or may not be carrying a few pounds more than is recommended by dietitians. Just because everyone loves The GBBO and salted-bloody-caramel everything shouldn’t mean that a shop that sells cakes must bear witness to the outer limits of our imaginations. It could be a butchers. Just imagine The Great British Slaughterhouse Off where contestants have to kill, drain and carve up a pig into sausages in under 2 hours under the watchful eyes of Tom Kerridge and Brian Blessed. It could be a cheese emporium or the freezer section of a cash and carry. Blimey it doesn’t even need to be food related. It might as well be a button warehouse or the toiletries and bleach aisle of an Iceland. Point being that we can all be tempted by our own odd and very specific demons.
So, to summarise, I have a will power roughly equivalent to a person of some description and unspecified physical capability standing, or sitting, well just being, in a place with the potential to access undisclosed items that would very much be the kind of undisclosed items that could lead them astray. And New Year’s resolutions are, by and large, utterly futile. That’s all I was trying to say.

G B Hewitt. 11.01.2019