Lost for Words

Saturday 19th and Sunday 20th March

I’m trying to decide what cake to make for a dear friend - chocolate or ginger? It has to double as a pudding for her birthday lunch for at least twelve of us. Nigella is my first port of call and in her celebratory book called Feast I find a chocolate AND ginger cake. I like the idea but I think her recipe needs tweaking so I stir in extra chocolate chunks and syrupy slivers of glace ginger to the mixture.

To make it more of a party pudding cake I slice it in half and fill it with whipped cream and mascapone cheese sweetened with sugar and vanilla, drizzle a blanket of chocolate fudge icing over the top and scatter cape gooseberries. Still in their peeled-back paper lanterns, they look like orange bees stranded in a sea of mud, flapping between the candles. But their tart fruitiness compliments the chocolate and ginger and the birthday girl is happy. And I’m relieved. The thing about a cake is that you can’t taste it till everyone else does - and by then it’s too late to do any more tweaking.

Before breakfast this morning we drive out to the woods for a walk. We pass a long grassy bank drenched in a wave of daffodils. I can’t help it - Wordsworth leaps out of my mouth - at least bits of his poem, all out of order -

a host of golden daffodils.....

I wandered lonely as a cloud.....

in vacant and in pensive mood.....

My husband doesn't join in the game of trying to remember the lines.

I ask him,

‘Do you know who Wordsworth is? ‘

‘Vaguely’, he says, ‘the word is familiar’.

‘But aren’t they beautiful - the daffodils,’ he says.

Yes they are. I can see his pleasure in them. So why does it matter that the words of a dead poet are lost to him? It’s just that they aren’t lost to me. Sometimes his pit of homeless words opens up between us and I could drown in there for a moment.

Then I see another swathe of daffodils up ahead - fluttering and dancing in the breeze.....