Everyone's A Winner

I've been somewhat diverted from writing of late because of a chocolate cake.  Poor excuse I know but you could almost taste the pheromones of competitiveness coursing around the hospital last week as our own version of the "Great British Bake Off" technical challenge took place on Ward 1.  Imagine the scene; seventeen bakers of all ages and dress size took on the Mary Berry 'chocolate sponge cake challenge' all in aid of the Macmillan Nurses charity; it was carnage.  We'd all been given the recipe at least a fortnight in advance so the playing field was level[ish], but mostly to give ourselves the opportunity to prepare and cheat where necessary; and believe me the mental preparation was vital.  Some people are natural-born winners like MedSec Barty who won a petrol mower recently.  It's irrelevant that she hasn't got a lawn, she says, and has resolved to save up for a bigger nest, with grass.  What matters is that she's a winner.  And so I got stuck in baking the cake with a winner's frame of mind.

"Preparation, preparation, preparation."  Chant this and all will be well, I told myself.  At the first attempt I made half the recipe in case it flopped in the middle, and was delighted instead with a fluffy and light chocolate gateaux fit for the Paul Hollywood Poke.  Have you noticed how he gets a finger and stabs it right in the centre of everything?  I always expect the poor buns to pop under his extreme inspection technique and prayed there would be none of this aggressiveness with our cakes.  And so the night before the judging I was armed with a schedule timed down to the last second and ingredients prepped and ready, I set to work after a long shift.

The longest job of any cake is greasing and lining the two cake tins and before you ask, yes I'd been out and bought new ones because my usual 20 year old Tala models with little or no Teflon left on them were not of the regulation size.  Job done, I mixed the cocoa power with boiling water into paste, lobbed it into the already prepared dry ingredients and turned on the mixer.  "Beat until light and creamy" it clearly states but after I'd added the eggs I sensed this wasn't quite the result Mary Berry had intended because it looked like slurry from one of the local farms.  On the plus side, it smelled like heaven.  So, into the oven and pacing like a new father in the maternity ward, I waited for the beast to start rising away from the bottom of the cake tin.  Except it didn't.  Twenty five minutes later both halves looked like large digestive biscuits.  And weeping tears of frustration I tried to get one out of the tin an hour later, it broke in half like the Great African Rift Valley and oozed all over the table.  There's only so much that chocolate cream icing will cover

Undefeated, I went back to Tesco at 11.00 pm and bought another stock of eggs and butter, and set the alarm.  Sleep?  I was so wired from the fumes of Green & Black's finest organic 70% that I'm sure I slept with my eyes open.  At 6.00 am, I was standing in the kitchen before my first mug of tea thinking,
"What the flock am I doing here?"  Winning.  That's what. So I started again, and this time made a delightfully even confection, jammed it up with Asda apricot conserve and made bacon sarnies for Alphonse while it cooled down.  Oh, we don't get treated to these every day as he's on statins but I felt really guilty of neglect somehow.  After all, the dreaded cakes had cost almost as much as the weekly shop if you take the petrol into account and I was in it for the glory.

I'd timed it to perfection for 8.30 am and the journey to work.  I'd even allowed for the school traffic and had battened down the cake with cling film to a silver wedding cake board.  Sadly, I hadn't allowed for the speed humps by the church and, braking just a little too sharply, I sensed the top half of the sponge slide effortlessly away from the jam and land in two pieces.  Make up your own swear words here, I did.  Life teaches us that Plan A is of no use if you haven't got a Plan B.  So I ran into the canteen, grabbed a palette knife and hoofed the two halves back together, jiggled with the topping and covered the whole lot in icing sugar because I'd brought it with me just in case.  Gorgeous it looked.  Good as new.  When I got upstairs and presented myself, why then did the chief judge look me in the eye and say,
"Have you been eating icing sugar again Raven?"
"What?"
"Your face is covered.  And you look like you've been rolling in ... well it's brown and sticky, so I'm guessing it's chocolate."
It's true.  As I placed my now priceless cake in a row with sixteen others and next to the one with the company logo stencilled in edible glitter, I looked like I'd been snorting cocaine after rolling in dog poo.

Anyway, some time passed while the judging team got stuck in and I have to admire their dedication.  Apparently, the four senior citizens resting in the corner later were volunteers from the Macmillan charity and deserve medals of their own for excess cake consumption.  When the results came out, I'd won a certificate and joint First Prize with one of the nurses, and Sandra had bagged the certificate for a plate of excellent scones. When I got home that night clutching my bottle of fizz and a wearing a huge grin, I asked Alphonse if he's like some cake with his pack up?
"Can I have fruit instead of cake?"
"No."
"Crisps then?  I've gone right off the smell of cake." Fair enough. I was feeling a bit bilious myself but my pride was at stake.
"Still NO!"  On closer inspection though, the cake I'd bought for charity had started to sweat and not in a ladylike manner so I softened my resolve.
"I'll buy you lunch tomorrow then.  Sushi maybe ... noodles.  Anything but cake."
I was too happy to care honestly, as I'd finally broken the jinx of a lifetime and won something, and I've been high for the last week although that may be the remains of the sugar rush.

Tip of the Blog:  On the day we'd raised over £700 for the Macmillan Nurses Coffee Morning, the one person who hadn't worked out the 'Bake Off' vibe was a visitor who stood at my desk asking a whole loads of irrelevant questions.  I'm guessing he was bored and wanted to escape his relative's room for some human/raven contact.  Eventually, he quipped,
"It's alright, you ladies can get back to your computer games now." He turned away unaware that he had awoken my inner Robert de Niro from Taxi Driver.
"Sorry. You talking to me???"  I'd had a particularly testy consultant standing over me for ten minutes previously and I was in no mood.
"Oh, I know what you girls are like the minute the boss's head's turned.  It's all Facebook and internet shopping."  We all froze as one and turned in his direction like The Stepford Nurses.
"Facebook? At Work? Are You NUTS??"  Still high on the Green & Blacks, Saab reached for a syringe and I had to be forcibly restrained from administering the Vulcan Death Grip.  Pass the Green & Blacks someone.

Raven

Pain and Mischief Managed

"Pain Management" is the latest buzz phrase in the sedation world and is proving very popular in these parts.  Loosely translated into plain English it means "someone is going to take a large syringe of anaesthetic attached to a brutally sharp needle and plunge it into your buttock."  Follow this procedure with the words, "There you go old chap, pain managed."  And it seems to work as long as the recipient follows the surgeon's advice.  You'd think with a mark the size a 50p piece on your bum and a numb leg that you'd do as the surgeon says.  Ha!  Imagine my horror when the call came from an injectee on this quiet Saturday morning asking,
"Can I take the dog for a walk?"  The instructions are implicit: light exercise for seven days meaning pottering in the garden and making a cup of tea. 
"Unlikely but I will check with the Nurse In Charge." I trotted over to the treatment room and ran back to the phone in a hail of bad language and shouts of "Not on your life!!!"  Deep breath Raven.
"Best you rest for a week and let someone else walk the pooch."  I hate to be the bearer of bad news and was trying to be friendly, and the devil in me had to ask "What kind of dog is it?"
"It's a German Shepherd and needs three miles a day.  If I don't walk him soon he's going to eat the sofa."  Lucky for me Pomello was sitting close by and reading the riot act thus saved the patient from a more painful conversation with the surgeon in two weeks' time.

You may think I'm mocking the afflicted but far from it; I'm empathising.  As the ungrateful recipient of a 5th lumbar injury during a Kung Fu demonstration somewhere around my 20th birthday, I would have walked to Mars if that had stopped the pain.  It didn't; neither did chiropractic or several osteopaths.  It also put a massive crimp in my ambitions to follow Bruce Lee along the path to the nearest Shaolin Temple, or to wear decent heels for the next decade. Still, I wear heels now and was rocking the night away at a Hen Party later on Saturday evening but obviously don't have to same stamina for it as I did in my 20's.  I also have a very low threshold when it comes to disco-cocktail bars with bouncers on the door and had found myself in a classic example of the genre about 11.30; well past my nesting time.  The entire crowd were like a massive conga line, snaking in the door, bumping & grinding along where the seats were, stopping off at the square metre of disco space and hustling forward slowly towards the bar to be fleeced for a load of coloured ice with vodka. And all the girls looked the same - flesh coloured dresses and weird, matted hair.  I save that look for early mornings but what do I know?  One of our number, Pineapple, has flaming ruby hair and in a skin tight frock of the same hue, she always draws a crowd of onlookers and one particular ape in the jungle had put half coconut shells down his shirt in a last desperate attempt to attract her attention.  It might have worked had the shells enhanced his already ample moobs but it created more a vision of King Louie from The Jungle Book singing 'I'm the King of the Swingers.'  His mates and the cocktail staff were all in Hawaiian shirts and it just compounded the picture of jungle mayhem; if only the fake Easter Island stone heads had started to sing we could have had another Disney classic.

When I was ready for a brandy & horlicks, I offered to help Malone stagger up the hill to the meeting point with her chauffeur but, in her condition, it was only a matter of time before she fell down a drain cover.  Still, when we'd made it to the top she slurred,
"Bettr wet here.  No late. Be here in mnut." Her lips had turned rubbery when the cold air hit them.
"I'm not standing on the corner propping you up like this."
"Whynot?"  Because we looked like the two oldest slappers in town, and she was in a fringed dress that was blowing in the wind like a 1950's lampshade.  Thankfully, the Audi turned up and all I heard through her husband's gales of laughter was
"She's such a lightweight."  Me too.

I digress because I've not mentioned the Bride to Be who, being from Eastern Europe, is game for a laugh with all the tinsel, flashing badges, durex and head gear she was forced to wear during the meal.  At least we didn't chain her to a lamp-post even though she begged us to for the photographs she's sending home to her Mum. She is also a brilliant keeper of secrets at work, in a place where everyone knows everyone's business.  For reasons I'm keeping under wraps for the time being, I want to expand my typing skillbase to include the MRI and CT scanning clinics and had secretly volunteered to do a trial session recently.  In charge of the department is the lovely Mandarin, who promised we could keep it to ourselves just in case I made a right fool of myself.  As it turned out, I didn't do too badly with the Asian consultant's dictation and was looking forward to hearing the results.  It was only seconds before Mandarin started laughing and called others into the room. They also looked at me and had a hearty laugh before patting me on the shoulder saying
"Brilliant.  The best laugh we've had for months Raven.  You can come again."
"It looks okay, what've I done??"  More laughter until Mandarin put me out of my misery.
"DrB doesn't ever describe the CT scanning technique as "looking good"."
"I'm not going deaf ... that's what he said." And so she played it back to me.
"Routine protocol."  Crystal clear.  Oh the pain of humiliation.
"Rubbish. I know what I heard!"  And after several offers to put my head in the scanner, I departed with my beak down at my belly button and bumped into the Bride to Be, who chirped
"So now you work here too??"  Big smile.
"No! NO! You mustn't tell anyone.  I've only done a quick trial." She wasn't convinced.
"You'd be really good.  All that medical stuff and jargon.  What's the secret?"
"I just don't want it to look like I'm scouting for jobs."  She didn't understand.  She also didn't understand why we'd kept her Hen Party doings a secret either.  Where she hails from, the whole town turns up, they all get riotously drunk into the night and no-one gets chained to a lamp post.  Pity!

Tip of the Blog:  I've had a few issues with the bloke in the nest over the road.  Nothing personal but his ancient [vintage] Fiesta blows black soot out of the exhaust and all over the bonnet of my car; usually after it's been fastidiously valeted by Alphonse.  Yes it wipes off but that's not the point because he always parks the heap too close and makes sure he revs the engine before roaring off, thus showing incredible maturity and not overcompensating in the slightest.  One particularly sleepless night last week, I resolved to have it out with him. Ten minutes later, there was a lot of shouting and a loud bang outside which catapulted me into the upright position and was soon standing, staring out of the window.  The Fiesta in question and a BMW had had a coming together in the dark resulting in much wreckage of the front bumper.  I believe the Beemer had a titchy scratch which polished out the following day.  As Harry Potter would say "Mischief managed."

Raven