Samizdata

Tonight the cream of the British and European blogerati is descending on Chelsea once more for one of our famous Blogger Bashes… and thus there may be rather less output than usual on this blog (and quite a few others) tonight.

but hopefully not too much…  

Through a family connection, my eldest brother Toby has got himself involved in the cake business. He used to be an accountant and a management consultancy hotshot, and the widow of his late wife’s brother used to run a cake-baking operation. So when she also died, Toby was one of the people who rallied round to help. That was a few years ago, but the resulting enterprise, Columbine Cakes, is still very much in business. Everything depends on how the cakes are baked, and the cook, the human hinge of the whole enterprise, is still going strong.

Columbine gets most of its business from already satisfied customers who come back for more, and from those lucky people with whom those customers share their purchases, often on special occasions like weddings when only the best will do. Columbine also has a nice new website, which will supply you with all the details if you want to purchase any of their products or get onto their mailing list.

Toby gave me a Columbine fruit cake for Christmas. It wasn’t quite as good as the cakes our mother used to make at Christmas time, but it was the nearest thing to such a miracle that I’ve ever tasted, that you can buy in a shop or through the post. If this fruit cake was anything to go by, then any Columbine product – and there are now quite a few – would be worth a try. None of them are cheap. These are not cakes for the penny-pincher, or, I imagine, for the calorie-phobic. But if you give any of them a go, I truly believe you won’t regret it. Enjoy.

Today I shall be leaving the wet and mouldy Albion for a snowy and frosty Mittel Europa. This means much lower temperatures but also fur coats, Christmas markets, hot mead, mulled wine, slivovica and lots of lovely, lovely traditional Christmas food. Provided I can heave myself away from all that feasting, I shall post about whatever catches my meta-contextual eye. Or may be I’ll just write about anything that still makes sense after drinking the fierce regional spirits.

I shall return to celebrate the New Year in London with the rest of the Samizdatistas.

A rare treat for me yesterday evening, albeit at the cost of an arduous three and a half hour drive down to the East Kent coast.

The treat was a dinner party at the home of fellow Libertarian Sean Gabb, his lovely wife Andrea and capitalist-buccaneer radical Rebecca Baty.

Sean and his wife live in the old garrison town of Deal, from where, on a sufficiently clear day, you can just see the coast of France; a fact which must have concentrated 18th Century English minds wonderfully.

The place reeks of history. Aside from the smattering of satellite dishes, the winding alleyways (too narrow to drive a car down) and huddled regency houses impress one that neither the topography nor fabric of the place has much changed since Napoleon glowered malevolently across the Channel.

It was a splendid and rousing evening. Stimulated for the most part by the sheer clarity of Sean’s thought processes, I drove home with a mind wrought giddy with ideas, the fresh blood of which has now begun to coagulate into something like A Manifesto for a Pragmatic British Libertarian. Presumptuous I know, but that won’t stop me working on it. Though a snappier title would not come amiss.