I've been thinking a lot about destruction and its opposite, construction, lately - cake philosophising if you will. Destruction, although a word with mostly negative connotations, is not always a bad thing. In fact, two of my (many) favourite things - archaeology and cakes - have destruction at their very heart.
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| Partly reconstructed basilica in Bolonia, Andalucia |
When the lay person thinks about archaeology, they don’t automatically jump to ‘destruction’, but one of the first tenets of archaeological fieldwork is that the excavation of a site means its total destruction. Once you have dug a site, it’s gone and, a bit like poor Humpty Dumpty, there’s no putting it back together again. To counteract this necessary destruction, we record and document each little step (‘we call it ‘preservation by record’), so that the site can be ‘virtually’ reconstructed. Sometimes, where there are extensive stone remains, it also allows the partial reconstruction of a site (as you might see at excavations of a Roman town, for example) - giving us tourists something at least half-way recognisable to look at. Why excavate at all? I hear you ask. Well, sometimes it’s about ‘rescuing’ a site that would otherwise be destroyed (e.g. by erosion) or excavating it in advance of planned construction or as part of a research project. Ultimately it’s about knowledge. We excavate to find answers that are nowhere else to be found. When was the site built? What is it? Who built it? Why? Of course, we don’t always find the answers we’re looking for and there are times when we only find more questions. But without the 'destruction' of the site, there would be no answers at all.
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Black Forest Gateau
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Naturally, you can't have destruction without first having construction. Two of my friends are in the middle of building projects (one large-scale, one small; both driving them round the bend). As I'm in the process of re-building my blog (bigger, better, shinier - coming to a page near you soon!), I too have had construction on my mind. I have discovered that, much like a real building project, doing a bit of a refurb on my blog is just as slippery time-wise as the real thing. My friend with the small-scale project was told it would take five days to complete. Two weeks later, she's still suffering the hell of builders in the house all day (she works from home), plaster dust in the air and hearing the constant refrain of 'yep, should definitely be done by tomorrow luv'. I naively thought I'd re-name and re-design my blog overnight. Not so. And as I only have myself to blame (no tea-drinking, head-scratching builders to vent my frustrations at) it requires lots of deep breaths and patience - Rome was not built in a day and my new blog won't be either it seems.
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| Cake demolition |
Construction of another kind altogether was involved in the creation of a birthday cake last weekend - there was a request for a Black Forest Gateau for a surprise 50th birthday celebration (a very retro cake and also very male, I often think - men usually request it. Odd fact of the day). So last Saturday morning saw me getting back to the 1970s to construct a towering gateau, with layers of chocolate sponge, cream and cherries (recipe next week). I rarely get to see my cakes once they reach the hungry hoards, but my sister happened to be at the party and sent me a photo of the gateau when it was all but demolished. Seeing the rubble and crumbs on the platter, with one lone slice standing of what was once a proud tower of Black Forest... well, it should have made me sad (all my hard work!), but instead it made me smile. Not just because all reports were that it was 'the best cake ever' (such outbursts always please), but because that is what a cake is for. A well-made, beautifully presented cake has only one real function - to be eaten and enjoyed. It is made for destruction and until it has been destroyed, it can't fulfil its destiny. I think Black Forest met his destiny very well indeed.
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