Family has gone to Brighton (boutique hotel) after all. I is free for a week (well, nearly, Sophie stays at home but must leave bedroom door open at all times if Eric there).I sitting in coffee shop. Sometimes I think Crouch End has so many coffee places it soon have to put up sign saying ‘No more organic cup cakes or funny coffees that give you milky moustache’
In Polva, my town in Estonia, we has only Café Flamingo, Polva where I work evening, preparing food tables, dirty dish collecting. I ask customers to take their seats and when I ready I bring menu and tells them what they have. Is theme restaurant with plenty plastic parrots. I work with Russian boy Vladislav, who no one else employ as sometimes has hygienic problem.
Anyway, is usual freelance people here (Eric say only euphemism for unemployment amongst people who wears Converse trainers). But I overhearing two people talking at table next to me. Is lady called Anne, who I understands writes for Evening Standard and man called Matthew. I think they thinks they is very important people.
‘I am very worried that no one is quite sure what the Big Society is,’ say Matthew looking bit depressed. ‘I have a terrible feeling people are thinking it is just the bits and pieces left after everything else has been flogged off on the cheap and they’re still expecting people to volunteer and do things for nothing. I fear it may just be another idea dreamt up on the back of one of Sam’s tasteful Smythson envelopes. I think we need to come up with something a little more agreeable sounding that people can relate to.’
Anne, who is eating her big cup cake (organic and yellow fluff), say ‘That’s it!’
Matthew look at her confused-like.
She point at cupcake in front of her.
‘Let us remember how for many years the humble cupcake was a poor, disregarded product in our society. Some of us have race memories of eating them, bauble-covered, at our own children’s parties but for decades they have been off the radar. It was only, I am reliably informed, thanks to a harassed mother in Twickenham who, faced with her own child’s party, grabbed a battered copy of Marguerite Pattern belonging to her mother and in desperation made cupcakes with yucky lime-green icing. They were soon such a success, especially with her fellow mothers who had had it up to here with raisins and raw carrots. A revolution had occurred. Soon said enterprising mothers – never let is be said that anyone from West London sits on their Boden behinds doing nothing – were creating companies all devoted to the cup cake. And soon they discovered that calling them organic meant they could be sold at a price about five thousand times the rate of inflation. We rest our cupcake case.’
Matthew look at her again as if she quite mad.
‘In a nutshell, out of the desperation and chaos of a mother in Twickenham comes something that serves a need most of us never knew we had. We call this the cupcake theory of society: that things will wibble and wobble but someone, probably from west of Holland Park, will eventually find a way of profiting from the distress of the rest of us.’
‘Er, we just tell them to eat cupcakes then,’ say Matthew.
‘Exactly. And a once a little birdie has spoken to Steve Hilton in his Palo Alto think tank the future is clear.’
She finish her cupcake and say ciao.
I not know what they mean either.
