Of Cake I Bake

 - And Make To Slake
 - and any other words that rhyme with "Cake".  Yesterday marked something of a sea-change in the workforce of my anonymous employer on Floor 17 of the Dark Tower; it was to be the last day many of us would be working together, as redundancy and different teams beckoned as of Monday.
     So!  Kat proposed a whacking big buffet, towards which Conrad stated he would contribute a Baileys and Maltester Cream Cake, which he treacherously made from normal wheat flour.*  Art?

Quite a hefty beast

     No sense of scale, but it's just over a foot long and 9" wide.  That topping is double cream whisked to thickness, since I couldn't find any whipping cream at short notice, and the little brown bits are crushed Maltesers.  None of it survived the afternoon.
     Of course I didn't have any myself - diabetes and a profound dislike of chocolate sponge cake saw to that.  However, it would have been churlish and rude to abhor the slice of cake that the ever-delightful Lauro offered me earlier this week.  Art?

     Fortunately it was only a small piece, but jolly nice for all that, and indeed all the better for being unexpected.  
     One reason there was no fresh content yesterday - you DID notice that there wasn't anything fresh posted yesterday, didn't you?** - was because I went out after work and helped to rid the world of many pints of evil beer.  A dirty job, but someone's got to do it.  Thus I didn't get home until nearly 10:30 post meridian, and then sat watching a peculiar drama called - well, enough of that later.
     Back to Wetherspoons.  Art?

Compatriots compatriotating

     Here you have some colleagues who normally only met over the phone.  Here they had to make eye contact and indulge in banter - rather a trial for Conrad, for he is a surly and incommunicative rascal at the best of times.  The beer helped, though.
     Alright, enough social chit-chat, let's give the motley a pint of cod liver oil after nailing the toilet door shut!

It Would Be Rude Not To
Conrad bestirred himself on Wednesday during lunchtime at the Dark Tower, for he was running perilously low on functional pens, so I decided to go visit W H Smiths and acquire another 15.
     What caught my eye on entering - what's that?  Because you're not properly dressed without a pen, that's why!  And mine all tend to run out at the same time - as I was saying, was an impressively large hardback book, which our resident Neanderthal Art will picture for us.

I forgive them that terrible punning title

     It was only £7 as opposed to the normal £35, so as my title alludes, it would have been shockingly rude not to have bought it.  So I did.  A lot of nice artwork inside, although finding out who actually did it is a rather tricky matter.  I'll get back to you on that.

As You Should Surely Know By Now - 
Conrad's mind flits around like a hummingbird on speed, in stark contrast to his, frankly, lumbering self.  Thus, when I had arranged all my nice new pens on the desktop, the description that popped into my head was "higgledy-piggledy".
     The next thing that popped into my mind was how Roland The Headless Thompson Gunner was able to identify Van Owen if he had no eyes thanks to having no head where did this phrase come from?  Art?

Pigs, being all higgy and shizzle

     It is, for once, not derived from Latin or Greek,*** and is from the 16th Century, being descriptive of the way in which pigs in a sty mass themselves in a confused manner.  I said a "sty" but you could of course substitute the word "pen" for the same effect, which is where we came in.

Now For A Filler
Since I need a small item to boost us up to count, I shall refer back to the volume I got from Manchester Bookbuyers earlier this week, "The Narrow Margin".  Art?

The same as my edition

     This is the second edition, which was updated in 1969, and which formed the inspiration for the film "The Battle of Britain", and since the latter only came out in 1969, I suspect it was based on the earlier edition.  The initial section and chapters deal with the development of the RAF and Luftwaffe in the years prior to 1939, and as far as I can see, the shooting doesn't begin until page 91 - your humble scribe only being on Page 31.  At which point it might be amusing to have the film playing in the background, nicht war?

In the UK, it is HIGH TREASON not to have seen this film

     -  well, amusing for Conrad.  Your view might vary.


*  Heh.
**  Your future survival depends on answering questions like this correctly (i.e. "Yes")
***  Hooray!