So it was the school fete yesterday – the hottest day of the year so far and not, you may well feel, ideal conditions to sell shed-loads of buttercream icing. Nevertheless, my girls and I had made a commitment to run a cupcake stall and run it we were going to, no matter what.
Saturday, the day before the fete, was also hotter than hell. You probably felt a little warm as you went about your business. Well, the kitchen of Divorce Towers was 400 degrees hotter than Satan’s armpit, as we whisked and baked and iced all day long.
Luckily, the cupcakes produced in these far less than perfect circumstances were actually rather beautiful. We don’t have anything clever like cool bags but we do have a few ice packs, which I tucked around the cakes to stop them vanishing into lakes of goo. We even created an optimistic range of St George cupcakes, which went like, well, hot cakes. Unlike our team. Grrrrr.
The fete was fun – my lovely friend S brought her beautiful cakestand along, which was just as well as I’d had a meltdown before leaving and left my stands and a batch of beautiful pink dollymixture cakes behind. Other friends came by and chatted and helped and we all had a wander around the other stalls and found a few bargains. We sold the cakes in aid of Great Ormond Street Hospital and a friend did say she thought it was very good for the girls – it was their idea, they did the lion’s share of the baking themselves, they loved the selling part and I think they feel a little glow of achievement. I did pilfer some of the money in order to buy the delicious PSA hamburgers at lunchtime and a friend hissed, ‘that’s a defibrilator you’re spending!’ But don’t worry, I put the money back.
Then it was off to see England play, and things went rapidly downhill. The normally serene confines of Dulwich Village became jammed with snarling middle-class people in massive cars, all desperate to get to their tellies. A French lady’s camper van got wedged in Gallery Road with a bus going the other way, and she went from car to car to explain the problem, evidently baffled at the hostile response she was getting. ‘You do realise England are playing in 20 minutes, that’s why everyone’s cross,’ I explained when she came our way. ‘Ah yes,’ she said. ‘But as I always say, they will still play even if you are not there to watch them.’
She was quite right, of course. We all would have been better off not watching. If only that bottleneck had gone on. And on. And on. And we could have missed the whole game. Oh well. The England car magnet has now come off the back of the Divorcemobile. And only the fact that David Cameron had to watch the match sitting with the German PM has cheered me up.