Thought for today:
"When I recently came across this image, it instantly brought my mind back to the cake shop of my youth. Twice in my young life cakes caused me great embarrassment.
The first occasion was when I was three years old. My father was in England working in a Yorkshire pit near Bradford. He was trying to get family accommodation to bring my pregnant mother and my two-year-old sister, Mary, across from Ireland to live here. On the day in question, My mother took me and my sister into a Dublin Tea Shop. As was customary at the time, the assistant would automatically bring a pot of tea to the table without the need to order, along with a cake stand that contained a dozen different types of delicious buns. One ate what one required and then paid on the way out. My mother only had enough money to buy herself a cup of tea and by the time she realised what I'd done, I'd scoffed down one cream cake and was feeding my face with a second. The story she told us afterwards was that we quickly did a runner.
The second occasion that a bun embarrassed me was when me and Geoffrey Griffiths (deceased for 15 years now), dared each other to enter a confectionery shop on our way to school in Heckmonwike and steal a cream bun. I was 9 years old and Geoffrey was 11 years old. Both of us considered ourself to be the best thief on the estate and yearned to be proclaimed 'the winner' to the much-sought-after title. Now the bun in question just wasn't any old bun, as that would have been too easy a task to accomplish for a pair of thieves with our shop-lifting abilities. We identified a particular large cream bun in the middle of the shop window and said that we would steal 'that' bun. Geoffrey went into the shop first and when the owner wasn't looking, he swooped to steal the bun. After he came out of the shop grinning from here to the other side of next week, we noticed that he'd only managed to steal half of the cream bun; leaving the remaining half on display for all to see. It therefore fell to me to enter the shop, distract the owner and then steal the other half of cream bun which surely would have drawn suspicion on the two of us, had it been left there in its half-naked form.
Years later, after my propensity to steal stopped, I became a Probation Officer. It was customary whenever a colleague's birthday arrived in the office, for the birthday boy to buy cream cakes all round. They were over thirty colleagues who worked in the Probation Office and so there was always a birthday to celebrate and a cream cake to eat. Despite it being over 60 years after my illegal foray into the world of cream cake confectionery, I never forgot my original sin as I licked the cream of temptation." William Forde: October 31st, 2013.
"When I recently came across this image, it instantly brought my mind back to the cake shop of my youth. Twice in my young life cakes caused me great embarrassment.
The first occasion was when I was three years old. My father was in England working in a Yorkshire pit near Bradford. He was trying to get family accommodation to bring my pregnant mother and my two-year-old sister, Mary, across from Ireland to live here. On the day in question, My mother took me and my sister into a Dublin Tea Shop. As was customary at the time, the assistant would automatically bring a pot of tea to the table without the need to order, along with a cake stand that contained a dozen different types of delicious buns. One ate what one required and then paid on the way out. My mother only had enough money to buy herself a cup of tea and by the time she realised what I'd done, I'd scoffed down one cream cake and was feeding my face with a second. The story she told us afterwards was that we quickly did a runner.
The second occasion that a bun embarrassed me was when me and Geoffrey Griffiths (deceased for 15 years now), dared each other to enter a confectionery shop on our way to school in Heckmonwike and steal a cream bun. I was 9 years old and Geoffrey was 11 years old. Both of us considered ourself to be the best thief on the estate and yearned to be proclaimed 'the winner' to the much-sought-after title. Now the bun in question just wasn't any old bun, as that would have been too easy a task to accomplish for a pair of thieves with our shop-lifting abilities. We identified a particular large cream bun in the middle of the shop window and said that we would steal 'that' bun. Geoffrey went into the shop first and when the owner wasn't looking, he swooped to steal the bun. After he came out of the shop grinning from here to the other side of next week, we noticed that he'd only managed to steal half of the cream bun; leaving the remaining half on display for all to see. It therefore fell to me to enter the shop, distract the owner and then steal the other half of cream bun which surely would have drawn suspicion on the two of us, had it been left there in its half-naked form.
Years later, after my propensity to steal stopped, I became a Probation Officer. It was customary whenever a colleague's birthday arrived in the office, for the birthday boy to buy cream cakes all round. They were over thirty colleagues who worked in the Probation Office and so there was always a birthday to celebrate and a cream cake to eat. Despite it being over 60 years after my illegal foray into the world of cream cake confectionery, I never forgot my original sin as I licked the cream of temptation." William Forde: October 31st, 2013.
