‘And she loved inventing some rare illness and going to some famous kurort […].’

I soon turned to contemplate the more animated manscape at my feet. Seeing a crowd of beggars standing together in dejected attitudes, I cast a handful of cash into the air, in such wise that the coins would fall plump among them, and then dropped behind the parapet of the pagoda.

I’d also whipped a billowing sugary quadruple ration of meringue and set it on top of four vast dishes of buttery crumbs and sharp, homemade lemon custard, and finished the chocolate sponge bases with whipped cream, thickened juices of black cherries and kirch, to make the seventies icon — Black Forest Gâteaux.

The truth of life lay in the vatic messages words sent, meanings beyond what the world called meaning.