seemed like a good idea at the time

Between the bedroom and the bathroom I had an idea of what to write today.

It was Christmas, but wasn’t a spiky holly idea, all prickles and hoopla. It wasn’t a bauble, a small planet of sparkle and potential shatter. It wasn’t a present, a past, a virgin birth, or a polite pagan throat-clearing from under the hedgerow.

It had solidity and the fruity, slightly boozy bulk of my Christmas cake. I knew it as I know my cake, as something I’ve mixed and baked and fed brandy and painted with apricot jam and smothered in marzipan and beaten the eggs and sifted in the icing sugar to dollop and swirl the royal icing and swoop over a final, edible silver dust. Like my cake, my idea was made through formulae from the inside out over weeks; but it wasn’t round and wasn’t iced, however, it felt white on the outside. It was a bit of a cube, squashed a bit flatter, with the corners rounded. A hard caramel. Sucked a bit.

It referenced something, or reflected something, which was its own shape, a darker shadow it overlapped. A fourth year pencil still life. The year you are given charcoal and learn about drawing the shape around the thing, not the thing itself.

That’s about all I remember about my idea of what to write. I had the idea, liked the shape; liked that it was contained, and moved on to have a shower, clean the loo.