Mugging Cake Ladies

There's the glorified Shire dream.

My sister and I have always had this vision for when we're old and spinstery. Instead of going slowly round-the-bend alone, we'll live in a little house, have a couple of lapdogs to coo over and make and eat an incredible amount of cake. From that point on, we will decline slowly and happily into obese insanity and scare the local children. Kind of like the Gingerbread lady of Hansel and Gretl fame, but without paedophilia and cannibalism, natch.

The stimulus behind this quite possibly lies in Mary Berry. 50's celebrity cook supreme, and writer of the best baking Bibles on which the Bowlface home is founded on. I swear I was weaned the day I discovered there was a bowl to lick.

Much to my hysterical delight, local Shire town Winslow decided to open its newly debuted Farmers' Market with the cake goddess herself. Upon hearing this news in the Shire rag, the date was firmly marked on the Bowlface calendar and we were going to meet our cakey idol, goddammit.

It seemed few other people shared my excitement. In fact, I had to explain to practically everyone just WHO Mary Berry was. However, come Sunday morning, the gathering crowds implied just one thing: the Shire was hot for celebrity, and it came elderly-shaped.

That's some serious ribbon-cutting action right there.

There were about 300 people there, at 10.30am on a Sunday, which pretty much sums up the priorities of Shire folk. People hadn't come so much to buy overpriced offal as to gawp at all the other locals, have a gossip, take numerous increasingly-trodden-on dogs out and, the wee 5% that were left, to get some celebrity chef action.

She was literally one of the cutest things I've ever seen. My mum liked her jacket, but a tiny 5'1'' vision in pink was only slightly disappointing in comparisons to my hoping she would have baked her own clothes. After holding a clearly nerve wracking speech about EC funding (to great cheers of 'hear hear' - I can't believe that even happens outside of costume dramas) and pigs etc, we got down to the nitty gritty and pounced on that cake lady.

I'm not that kid with the eyepatch, by the way. She was my competition.

It was amazing. She congratulated my mum on covering her cookbooks in plastic, signed them with 'best wishes' (although not 'love', which someone else got...we'll gloss over that), and left a whole lot of joy in my heart that even cake can't reach.