High Flyer

Katie getting the hang of throwing stones UP at Belhaven Bay, East Lothian. After a lovely little 5th birthday party for Katie in the house, we headed to Dunbar via the beach to pick up packed lunch odds and ends.

I was up at 8 (9 really BST / GMT+1 fans) creaming butter and sugar, beating in the eggs and folding in the flour, for Katie's cake. How come that works? How come someone learned to make butter, someone learned to make sugar, chickens were bred to produce eggs, someone learned to make flour and then added stuff to make self-raising flour... and then someone came along and made up "creaming", "beating", "folding", greasing tins, someone made up greaseproof paper, exactly the right oven temperature, exactly 20 minutes.... How come that works? Maybe God likes cakes.

Then I put lemon curd in the middle, iced it, Katie plonked silvery sugary things all over it, added candles, I lit the candles, she blew them out... (And unfortunately five candles isn't nearly as funny as four candles.)

Oh, and the pass-the parcel was wrapped in the Financial Times. Because it's pink. Obviously.

What a complex and wonderful world we live in. The archaeologists'll have a great time working all this out.