Gluttony for Punishment
How three cakes a day saved my sanity (and nearly destroyed everything else)
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The Poppyseed Bakery still exists at the hamlet of Cross in Hand. Cross in Hand. Interesting place name. Should have paid more attention when I pulled up outside, that first time, in my ropey brick-red Landrover. Should have taken its advice, gone in with a crucifix raised, the first time I jangled that angelic-sounding bell above the shop door.
Because the cakes. Oh my word, the cakes.
The devil’s emissaries, disguised as comfort. And I was lost. Miserable as a puppy in a sewer pipe. Trapped in full-time mothering with three under-fives and zero assistance, thanks to a fuckwit first husband who tricked a woman with more degrees than sense into enslaving herself as his baby-maker, childminder and housekeeper.
Did I need a cake? You bet I did. But which one? How to choose between the Bakewell tart, the apricot Danish, and the traditional bread pudding? The bread pudding in particular. Technically, it looks unimpressive. You rarely see it for sale; it’s a home bake.
But it was a staple of my childhood. A childhood where food and love were the same thing, and I never got enough of either. My mother, brought up in the war, wouldn’t throw out stale bread, and this was our sweet compensation for life on a budget. It tasted of home, which, for all its faults, I felt a longing for. To be a child again, and have no responsibilities, instead of too many.
I was too tired to choose. I didn’t want to choose. I bought all three.
I’d stopped for a loaf of bread. The bakery was on the way home from the nursery school (which, when I lived imprisoned in the countryside, was a ten-minute drive from our house). Misery was an everyday situation, and now misery had company. Cakes.
From that day forward, every weekday in termtime, I’d stop off on the way back from nursery “to get some bread.” Never less than two cakes. Mostly three. I’d tell myself two of them were “for later”. Later was always just after I’d finished the last one. I didn’t think about gluttony’s place in the Seven Deadly Sins. I was already living in Hell. The cakes were the tiniest piece of compensation.
I was not tiny at this point, after three children and the Health Visitor’s idiotic weight-loss advice of “eat more pasta”. Three cakes a day, and I wasn’t getting any tinier. The larger I grew, the more miserable I grew (and really the more miserable I grew, the more “compensation” I needed).
Misery is love’s fuel gauge. It’s a clear indication of an empty tank. Sure, I knew, you can’t fill your tank with cakes. Cakes aren’t actually love, despite the way they felt. The only hole in my life I was filling was my cakehole, and that never lasted long enough, truly. But those days, before my breakdown and breakthrough, I felt powerless to change the way I felt. What I wanted to change was my circumstances, and trapped as I was, I had no idea how.
And if someone had told me that gluttony was a sin, I’d have just said F you. The word 'sin' made me bristle; my understanding of it was traditional, judgmental, and irrelevant to anyone who wasn't Christian. I didn’t understand it as an action that only increased the distance between where I was and the core state: embodying love.
My relationship with food has been disordered ever since, as a child, I felt compelled to steal it. (I spent the years 8-18 under a system I call “Food Apartheid” where the grown-ups ate quality food and we kids were restricted to the cheap stuff). By staying in that marriage, I broke my metabolism so badly I’ve still not recovered.
But mostly, these days, I have enough self-love to have a bite of something sweet and then leave it.
And maybe, if you’ve come a few miles along the same bumpy road, you do too.
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Paid subscribers: click through for Week 2 of our Seven Deadly Sins Writing Challenge: Exploring Gluttony as a Path to Happiness. If you want to explore your relationship with food (whether or not that problem is gluttony), this one is for you!
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I had NO idea we had so much in common in our former lives with former “fuckwits.”
This resonates a lot. Although for me, I eat when I’m miserable, delighted, tired, well rested, full or hungry… it still has a big hold on me. I love your definition of sin, will definitely read your other posts in this series