Mr Cakebread's Writings

          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...

          When grasping for the remaining teabags in the depths of my emptying box of Lidl's own-brand earl grey this morning, I couldn't help but get carried away in a spiral of thoughts of recent times I had quite defiantly defended my purchases of shop-brand teabags to zealots of the known brands. The arduous task of recovering the teabags from behind a cityscape of mug towers and rival hot-drinks choices gave me much time to think. The assailants, who are admittedly my friends and family, justified their brand loyalties with faith-based anecdotes like: 'at least it's real tea leaves in my tea bags!', or the more diplomatic: 'I'd just rather spend a bit more and get the proper thing...'. None of this would trouble me, were it not for the fact that so often, in the many involuntary discussions on society and the world order I am engaged in, I am employed as the defender of capitalism amidst their vague and incoherent socialist claims.     ...