The Seven-Day Slice

Morning friend.

Our house smells like Christmas.

This would be unremarkable, given it is my favourite time of year, were it not still only the first week of September.

I have just walked through the front door after taking Ziggy through the woods.

The sun is warm, but there is a coldness beneath it.

Not proper Yorkshire cold.

Just enough to make you pull your sleeves down a bit and feel quietly grateful that you live somewhere with seasons.

At around six o’clock this morning, I was exchanging messages with my friend Ross.

Ross recently moved his family to Portugal, where I imagine he now wakes each morning, opens the doors to his balcony and steps out with a strong coffee into approximately 25 degrees of self-satisfaction.

And he deserves every drop of it.

But walking through the woods today, with sunlight breaking through the trees and cold air in my lungs, I wondered whether I could ever leave this feeling.

The sharpness of an English morning and the slight sense that autumn is coming.

The changing light and angle of the sun quietly tell us that the year is beginning to turn.

Halfway through the walk, I bumped into one of my students.

Joe was taking 45 minutes for himself before starting work.

We stood beneath the trees and talked for a while. Before we went our separate ways, he told me he reads this Briefing every week.

He said it helps him think more deeply about the way he is living his life.

I carried that thought home with me.

Sometimes you send words out into the world without knowing where they might land.

Then, on an ordinary Thursday morning in the woods, a few of them come bouncing back.

When Ziggy and I walked through the back door, the smell hit me again.

Brandy and mixed spice, with something warm and sweet underneath it.

I had been up early making our Christmas cake.

The fruit had already been soaking in brandy and orange zest for five days.

The cake will now sit wrapped up for the next three months. Every couple of weeks, I will unwrap it, feed it a little cold Yorkshire tea and carefully put it back to sleep.

The week before Christmas, but never before, I will cover it with marzipan and royal icing.

I will then try once again to create the snow scene I have pictured for years. I still use the tiny toy robins, plastic holly and Santas my late Grandma placed on her cakes for decades.

It has never once resembled the picture in my head.

By that point, however, there is too much brandy involved for anybody to care.

Once the icing has hardened, we will finally cut into it.

Sixteen slices.

Four each.

After five days soaking, almost three months maturing and a few final days for the icing to set, every slice will have taken nearly a week to make.

It will probably be eaten in less than two minutes by teenagers who struggle to do anything slowly these days, especially with food.

This always strikes me as a highly inefficient way to deal in cake.

But I’ll do it again next year.

Earlier that same morning, before folding the fruit into the mixture, I had used AI to begin building a project timeline for the second academy we are opening in the new year.

A piece of work that might once have taken several days began taking shape in minutes.

I am grateful for that.

There are jobs that should be made quicker.

Spreadsheets and Gantt timelines are definitely among them.

There is no particular virtue in taking three days to do something if it can be done better in three minutes.

But not everything deserves to move fast.

This week was also our wedding anniversary.

Sara and I have now been married for 17 years.

That is an easy sentence to write.

It is an impossible task to do those 17 years justice in only 10 words.

A lot of life has happened since then.

There have been periods when work pulled me away without notice and times when one of us has had to carry more than our fair share at home.

We watched both our boys struggle in hospital wards during their first weeks on this planet. 

Now they are growing into young men, while we are still trying to work out when to hold on to those vulnerable boys and when to get out of their way.

We are not the same people.

Our relationship is not the same either.

It has become something I could not have understood back then. 

I simply had not lived enough of it to know that what a relationship needs from us keeps changing, even after 17 years.

If I left the Christmas cake in a cupboard until December and never returned to it, I could not pretend I had been patiently helping it to mature.

I would have forgotten about it.

The cake still needs to be fed. I think relationships do too.

That does not always mean grand gestures. More often, it means the small acts that go unnoticed.

Seventeen years have taught me that sometimes love means realising I am about to lose my temper and keeping the Commando vocabulary to myself. Sara definitely appreciates that more than jewellery or flowers.

What really matters is that we return often enough to notice what is needed.

That sounds easy, but it rarely is.

There are always other demands competing for our attention, most of them presenting themselves as urgent.

The important things are often quieter.

They never send reminders.

Playing the long game is not sitting still and hoping time rewards us for waiting.

It means continuing to care about something when the reward remains out of sight.

We live in a world that is becoming remarkably good at removing the wait and rewarding us for rushing.

That can be useful when you need a project plan on a Thursday morning.

It becomes less useful when what you are trying to create requires sustained care.

We start to wonder why our bodies have not changed after one good week of eating, or why something we have spent years building still looks unfinished.

We can even become impatient with other people for not changing as quickly as we would like.  

Marriage, unsurprisingly, gives us plenty of opportunities to practise that.

I could buy a Christmas cake in December.

It would be easier and quicker.

It would definitely look better.

But it would not carry this morning inside it.

It would not contain the ache in my hand from folding the soaked fruit into the thick mixture with a wooden spoon.

There would be nothing of the cold walk through the woods, the early messages from Portugal or the unexpected conversation with Joe.

It would just be cake.

And if there’s anything I’ve learned over the past 46 years it's that cake, like marriage, is worth doing right.

Later today, Sara will return home after a week away in Greece with her friends.

The smell of Christmas will probably still be hanging in the house when she walks through the door.

Tomorrow morning, we will get the boys set for school and college, walk Ziggy through the woods again and fall back into ordinary life.

The cake will be wrapped and placed somewhere cool until I return to it in a couple of weeks.

For now, it has everything it needs.

And tomorrow, on a cold September morning, so will I.

Before we go any further, let’s take a moment to debrief together:

What or who in your life needs more time and care from you?

Your mission this week, if you choose to accept it:

Choose one answer to that question.

Decide what it needs from you now and give it that this week.

Before the week ends, decide when you will return to feed it again.

That’s enough for now. 

More next Sunday.

Mike