Let them eat cake!

Oh dear, that's blown it. The fat lass has a confession to make. This isn't pretty, but the planets must have aligned along the wrong axis (or something similar) allowing that dreaded low-carber's nemesis, the cunning Christmas cake-monster, to trip me up.

It crept up on me in clandestine fashion and attacked stealthily, bushwhacking me the form of a beautiful, golden-brown, home-made cake, lovingly baked by a colleague's grandmother. An absolute delight, chock-full of fruit, nuts and candied peel and liberally laced with spices and alcohol, both looking and smelling EXACTLY like the ones my darling Mum used to bake. Deliciously un-iced too (heaven forbid!), it was even topped with perfectly placed whole almonds, wrapped in greaseproof paper and stored in a Quality Street tin, just like hers. Arrrgh! I found myself in serious peril, but managed to resist for two whole days as it grew smaller and smaller.

I thought I was safe. I admired it, and sniffed it, and looked longingly at it, and dreamed and drooled about it, but fended off the urge valiantly and didn't as much as nibble a crumb... er, until my Monday went seriously pear-shaped. And pear-shaped was definitely what happened. Although many of my colleagues have still not returned from the festive break, more than one of the individuals who have come back are... I'm going to be polite here... a pain in the posterior!

Not just demanding, not just cranky, not just depressed that Christmas is 'over' for another year, but also (in my humble opinion) pretty darned careless too. See I've spent much of Monday 'mending' and 're-mending' a piece of equipment, over and over again. I can't say I'm best pleased. I've had an engineer in too, fixing another item, and a variety of visitors, phone calls, emails and general 'crap' I could have done without and hadn't really anticipated... all whilst attempting to catch up on some financial stuff I'd failed to get finished before the holidays. Ho hum, such is life.

So the cake-monster lay quietly in wait and bided it's time before it ambuscaded me good and proper! By late afternoon, only one small sliver remained, and I could have resisted that without too much heartache... indeed, I did!

But the greaseproof paper was littered with the crumbled and crumbly remnants of the rest of the cake and this is what got to me. That linked straight in to a lovely memory of sharing similar delightful debris with my Mum at the end of a holiday, both of us picking up the sweet little bits by licking our fingers and dabbing them in the crumbs with glee to 'clean the plate'. And I'm sad and worrying about my lovely Mum at the moment which means that, pretty much, I'm fair game to be hijacked.

So that's what the fat lass did. Hoovered up every last one of those little tasty titbits. There could only have been about a tablespoon or so of 'bits', but every single scrap was near-pure carbohydrate. Half of me relished each and every mouthwatering morsel, while the rest of me chanted a litany of 'sod it!', 'sod it!', 'sod it!' as the carbs were consumed.

Seems that, just like Oscar Wilde wrote, I can resist anything except temptation. Not the finest start to 2013, eh?