Mr Cakebread's Writings

         Or is it? Existing is easy, but living is hard. Existing is a selfish enterprize, guided foremost by self-preservation. It obeys social and intellectual conformity, because dissent is perilous and lonely. One cannot pursue truth in the constraints of their peers' likeness, when the questions that face them as individuals, demand the most moral character. If most of the group takes the easier and immoral path, it becomes dangerous for the individual to pursue truth and live, lest he risk his comfortable place in the social order.            It is here that one begins to understand that living is harder than existing. It brings less pleasure and more discomfort. People who exist are more likeable, they enable pleasure and never threaten the social order. People who live, they make things awkward and they have less fun. On the surface in fact, it doesn't make much sense at all to live, but to exist ins...

            It may come at a strange time to be reviewing this book, when the world descends into tyrannical health & safety measures in response to the bio-political catastrophe of COVID-19, of which there are endless things to write. But I have been meaning to summarize my thoughts on this book since I read it, one year ago. The four books I have read since have not surpassed it, which is no detriment to them, because this book is fantastic. I received this book as a gift from a close friend, who was aware of my interest in the author; whom prior to his unsuccessful campaign for Tory leadership, wrote a couple of documentaries on Lawrence of Arabia, which I had watched while trundling through the dense and epic ‘Severn Pillars of Wisdom’.           For those unaware, Stewart, inspired by T.E. Lawrence’s archaeological walks through Arabia during the writing of his thesis, ‘Crusader Castles’, embarked on his own solo ...

Sorry sights to see them grieving, six feet from each other. A girl weeps their in solitude, but does not hug her mother. Damp masks a'soaken slide down chin, and words they share between them. Bouncers intervene therein those actions they condemned. "You've been told once, you've been told twice. The masks, they stay up here" He gestured for them, with his fingers, masking ear to ear. They tried to mourn, now feeling scorned, for whom they lost that day. But they could only feel one feeling, not grieving, but dismay. The party was dismissed just then, and ordered not to linger. "Back to your homes and to your bubbles", again he waved his fingers. They queued to leave in single file, their heads down, eyes averted. The warden watched in comfort though, his safety not subverted.

          He reached out his arm, with a desperate but determined look on his face. She wanted to hold onto it, with every fibre of her heart. “it can be just us, forever and for no one else”, he told her. She felt shame for every act against such an idea she had committed before now. Who could forgive such an ugliness, in the light of something so pure?, s he thought. He assured her that where they could go together “all good things are framed in beauty and all darkness can be forgotten”. Darkness was so normal to them both, that she could not believe it and she expressed so. “How do you know that we can have this?”. He paused, and for a moment his faith trembled. “I don’t know”, he replied. Activity could be heard in the distance, and they both turned to it with a panic. But even the delay of their potential separation by outside forces could not throw ice over a burning intensity to their unfinished words. She and her words were more important to him t...

          Across the landscape now, ordinary souls trade warm glares and bizarre, imitative ‘air-hugs’, where once private and tender embraces embodied the bonding rituals between friends and families. Those that defy the ban on hugs and kisses with their loved ones, confess like guilty school children to each other, that ‘they shouldn’t be doing it’, but all is well because they are very sure that they do not harbour the virus.           Never in human history has a state apparatus successfully mounted itself as a valid authority on intimacy between loved ones. In a culture that turns ever-increasingly more hostile to private life and stable family units, it’s no surprise that there isn’t much outrage about this short-sighted assault on our freedoms to manage who we can and cannot hug.           Not so long ago, people would have found it insulting, patronizing and infantile to abide unquestioning...

        For almost a single week, the house was a place of peace and private coexistence. The housemates therein greeted each other with nonthreatening mumbles as they entered rooms, passing by those uncomfortably narrow corridors in their morning routines. Plates were frisbee'd less violently from the drying board to their cupboards in the early hours of the morning, the borders between territorial fridgespace were duly respected and no drunken wanderer helped himself to another's unsupervised perishables. But this civility, like the lifespan of those fractured, poorly washed plates would dryup in the grey, cloud-choked sunrise of the following morning.           He sulked and stirred in his sleep. "My porridge oats", he grumbled. "It was definitely them, I'm sure of it". The paranoia of his resources being exploited by others, beyond his control, constantly haunted him.  They must have been eating it, together, in a big ...