Cup of tea and a slice of cake.

A simple thing, a piece of cake.

When leaden skies pervade the day,
And respite’s sought from out the grey,
A kettle with fresh water filled,
The steam expands and whistle trilled.

Within the pot the leaf is laid,
And piping hot the water spray’d,
The brew commences, minutes three,
Then more tick by, brew’d strong suits me.

From the cup hook, mug ceramic.
Milky splash, a dose of lactic.
Mug adorned with locomotive,
Stands to hold whate’re the pot give.

The tea in truth alone is meet,
But ofttimes lacks a certain treat.
A piece of cake, a simple thing,
Can be the making of a king.

But which cake holds the crown rightly?
‘Tis the sweetmeat quartered brightly,
In shades of pink and yellow dress’d.
Battenburg, I call thee the best.

I do like a cup of tea and a slice of cake and yesterday being a particularly grey day weather-wise, I did indeed seek refuge in a cuppa and a slice, just what’s needed to lift the spirits.

I started to compose the above ditty in my head and then wound-up the old clockwork laptop to commit it to random access memory. Alright, no, it’s not really clockwork but it does seem to run slow sometimes. Maybe I need to put another shilling in or something.

I started with rhyming couplets but soon thought that no, it didn’t all have to rhyme or scan and no it doesn’t, but as I’ve written before, there is something deeply satisfying when things do scan and rhyme and they can be made to, eventually, most of the time.

Having just recently read some Alexander Pope, yes, it was ‘The Rape…’, I was of a mind to employ some contractions, you know the sort of thing, where you leave out a vowel and replace it with an apostrophe and hence hope to lose a syllable. For truthfully, such passes for muse these days.

Then when I counted back the syllables, it became apparent that there wasn’t really any need for apostrophised contractions but I liked the way they looked so following the first rule of poetry; My Poem, My Rules, I kept them in.

I do like a nice piece of Battenburg.