I remember it happening to me when I lived here as a kid. I left Ottawa a tomboy who scowled her way through all manner of family photos due to being forced into a stupid dress. The next thing I knew I was wearing skirts on Saturdays. We were allowed to wear mufti at school provided it was a skirt or a dress so we all stockpiled. It went from there to voluntary. I’d go home at school holidays and keep the jeans at bay to the degree my mom’s head shook. What was with all the skirts? I was just as English as the English was what.

Those days ended. I went back to Canada and acclimatized for the life of me. Speaking of climate – I’m a long john lady come winter. I need two layers of trousering to keep the shivers at bay – not half of one.  I need the kind of down parka that in no ways flatters skirts. I need a cardigan atop my cardigan – not a bodice. How do the English chicks do it? And where do they find those skirts that pull up over their bums just so with a kick pleat for striding purposes? Where do they find stretch tweed?

Sticking jeans under yours heels and grabbing dangly earrings and a cute top – sorry but that’s dressing up in the Toronto girl way. Nice try. Sooner or later (sooner) a British dude expects a skirt.

I dated one gent a commuter train ride away, which entailed a tube change to get to the train station and of course an overnight bag strung across my shoulders containing my track shoes, hiking shoes and  clothes until Sunday. Quite a lot to cope with Friday afternoon in a rush from work. Eventually I apologized for jeans again.

“I know, you need to work harder,” chap said.

GAAAHHHH!!!!!

In the way these transactions have probably gone down since time immemorial, I hereby pledge to pop into a skirt the moment I am invited out anywhere fancy-pants. It’ll be my feminine end of the deal, I get that, I’m up for it. Except that I’m not really into it at all. I want to wait out from now until May slurping yogurt in my track pants ignoring whatever suspenders are shoved in the back of my knicker drawer and frocks are lurking behind my blouses.  No hotel bar could be worth the strain.

Come summer I will indeed eyeball my sundresses…and likely nix them when the mercury skulks around 20 yet again. Sorry, English guys, skirts are your thing not mine.

My name is Louisa and I’m a Tesco shopper. There, I’ve said it. So sue me, shun me, rise above me. Do whatever it is you need to do to us filthy transgressors.

Let me explain. When I first moved here it was with a certain amount of bravery: I’d just had the most toxic break-up of my life. I needed to pick up shattered self, hot wire my ego back together, and get the hell out of Charlottetown of all places. A stint in London seemed more promising than dragging my dumped butt back to Toronto. I booked a flight and went for it. The moment the plane’s wheels were up? All need for bravery got sucked out the window. I was fine, it was all behind me. Indomitability and I were working partners once more. Hello again, optimism, hello, future.

Very fortunately for me a generous friend of a relative took me in upon landing. We thought at first I might pay rent and stay. I swiftly proved too irritating for that. Nothing I was doing as such, just my bare bones nature imposed on that of someone living a busy life who needed her space after all. That was fine! I was fine! I was jogging around my new hood already! What was that I spied? A grocery store! Clever me! Why not head straight there for my first batch of UK groceries? How positive was that?

“I found a supermarket and got loads of my special supplies!” I told my hostess, lugging in bags full of olive oil, broccoli, apples, oatmeal and still quite a few vulnerabilities.

“Tesco?” she eyed my ceremonial loot and said. “Oh NO. Tesco is the ENEMY!”

It has been muttered that Tesco squeeze the family farmer like no other conglomerate. Who knows whether more of Tesco’s eggs are battery laid, or more of Tesco’s grapes sprayed, or more of Tesco’s chicken something you ought to eat when you’re down with strep throat. What I do know is that Tesco isn’t posh. Not one bit. Whereas the sight of a Waitrose fills me with a sense all’s right with the world because the world is sufficiently middle class (upper-middle class, actually; if I wanted middle class I’d go to Sainsbury’s) with Tesco such socio-demographic bets are off.  Okay, it’s no Iceland — there’s a produce section. But Tesco offers zip in the pretension department. There we have the real sin.

“We tried to economize by shopping there but it’s simply not worth the degraded quality,” another friend shivered when I mentioned to her that Tesco was the enemy.

“Where are you?” a British man in my life texted. I’m so honest. “Tesco. I nevr want u 2 c me this way,” I replied.

Newsflash:  I can assure you that Tesco’s pink lady apples are no worse and sometimes better. Total  yogurt is generally a little cheaper than elsewhere, although they dick with my mind and vary yogurt prices neighbourhood to neighbourhood – we’re talking £2 instead of £2.50 for the love of god. What the hell. They have a premium in-store line of organic balsamic and onion marmalade etcetera. Some Tescos are so huge you get oppressed by choice in that good old North American way. They’re frigging everywhere.

The British class system is notoriously pervasive but every once in a while I just say no.  I say, I’m going into Tesco for bin liners, rooibos and vacuum packed steamed beets and I don’t care who knows it. Just don’t expect me to get so much as one sock from hideous, foul, bottom-of-the-barrel, ugh ugh ugh,  nasty Primark. I never said I wasn’t selectively ashamed.

I’m discovering that one of the worst things you can feel is nostalgia; missing lost things is killer. One of the least corrosive forms of nostalgia is a wistfulness for businesses that have gone under. RIP Woolworth’s. Nice to know you, Pan Am.  Didn’t ever know you, Peacocks. Little Chef…say what?

I read last month in the UK press that Little Chef had gone griddle up. Apparently, it was a chain of roadside restaurants that predated modern British motorways but ended-up linking them. In a country, England, where I’m no driver but I’m guessing you can get from one tip to another in a day, long haul drives were initially punctuated for many by a stop at a Little Chef for highly pedestrian grub.  Not as much of a road trip mentality exists here, paradoxically: when you can’t drive for days you’re more unnerved about driving for hours. For years, egg, chips and a cuppa at a Little Chef cured many a chauffeur’s woes.

I went on a minor road trip this weekend, to Poshtershire, aka Gloucestershire, where the Cotswolds happen north west of Oxford. You get there by taking an M out of London then an A or two past the palace of Winston Churchill’s birth (Caution, Private Property) until the hills start to roll.

An hour in, just short of Oxford, we needed petrol and a loo break. It was a nippy day so getting out of the car required a dab of fortitude.

Take a look at the frozen fountain. Take a look at the vast mall behind it. Wait a minute, that’s no mall…that’s a motorway service station.  Yes, an enterprise devoted purely to servicing fatigued travellers with about ten different food outlets, an entire grocery store, a handbag boutique, a florist, lavatories with eighty stalls per gender, and a seating area that would dwarf a hockey rink..

Why was I so rattled? I don’t expect the biggest things to be Canadian but I definitely expect them to be North American. For all I know, Route 66 has Leviathon-like rest stops with every convenience imaginable. I’ve never seen anything so sprawling as this place anywhere I’ve driven, however, which takes in Charlottetown to New Orleans with  detours. “Oxford is very tony,” my journey mate said. “There aren’t many other service areas this vast.” There better not be or I’m left feeling extremely Yahoo amongst the Houyhnhnms. Not only do we colonials not do oldest, we don’t necessarily do largest.

I went to one of the two Starbucks and ordered crow.  Who needs nostalgia in this brave new world of gargantuan amenities to be found in relatively small countries? (The empty beer bottles you see aloft on a growing sheet of ice, which, if I were in a real snit I’d take to be metaphoric, were not ours.)

But it seems a little sad to me to lunge with, let’s face it, a dab of desperation at proximity to one of the swishest patches of real estate in the world i.e. Kensington proper. Fine, South Kensington can get away with it. South Ken has collected enough ritzy allusions of its own. Personally, however, I’m forthwith putting my foot down when it comes to references to West Kensington – unless I’m talking property forensics with an estate agent while stabbing at a map.

After all I live right on the Hammersmith Road. (It ain’t pretty but it somehow gets a the, as does the Holloway Road, coincidentally or not one of my former haunts.)

“How are things in The Hammer?” my pal M asked last week. “Ha, ha,” I said. Then I squirmed. Then I cracked and specified. “Actually, I live just west of where Kensington High Street becomes Hammersmith Road,” I reminded dear M. “Yes, yes, I know,” M soothed. She of snazzy Belsize Park. Truth is it would take me ten minutes to walk to Hammersmith Tube. There’s a station closer than that .

What I’m trying to say is that I live not quite opposite from, but solidly kitty corner to, a massive London landmark which is all I need mention to situate myself accurately for any Londoner who’s been west of Hyde Park. Ladies and gentlemen, I live in OLYMPIA.

I’m compelled to spell it in caps because right outside my window, as I type these words, I am reminded of OLYMPIA for the eighth time hourly…

It puts one under pressure, actually. Adjacent to Olympia, surely one should live an Olympian life full of strength and consumption…Watch me heft this girder. Pass me that entire cake.  Time for my next marathon…So far so not Olympian. But I may yet stir my way to the perfect wild mushroom risotto . I may dare attend a spin class at my new gym. I may wash the windows or even the blinds. Feat-wise there’s hope.

Olympia began as an National Agricultural Hall but early on, back in the 1880′s when rational recreation was holding sway, that didn’t seem quite good enough. For sure the Victorians rebranded. Olympia was one result. Long may it…

…provide healthy amusement and reinvigorate by brilliant  demonstrations the national love of athletic exercises and contests of skill; to  raise the tone of popular taste by entertainments and displays which shall be of  the purest and highest character; to educate the masses, aye, and even the  ‘classes’ by exhibitions of art, science and industry.

Sorry, gotta go. Somehow all of a sudden blogging doesn’t cut it. Seriously, I’ve got to limn a pastoral scene, isolate a particle, and erect a bridge. At the very least launder my duvet cover which just got two pounds of smog belched on it as a result of three minutes of open window. Ah, life in OLYMPIA.

Lord knows I dig the residues of formality to be found in British culture. The excuse me’s when inadvertent bumping happens. The Dear So and So salutations that start emails. The unadulterated courtliness of fishmongers.  Mongers at all. The delivery of any expertise which goes back three times as many generations as I’m used to collecting pomp along the way.

Sometimes I just assume British culture is more formal. Case in point: inductions.

Upon being informed of the need for my first induction I was, like, say what? Needles here are injections so you can understand my slight flurry.  Wasn’t there also a hint of Reverend Jones-like brainwashing behind the term? Or ingestion. What gets ingested? Nothing good, right? God forbid I was in for an epidural.

It turns out an induction is a plain old orientation. A here-are-the-ropes, get to know them situation. I had a mini one at my EFL school before starting. Here’s the staff room, here are the registers, here’s where to steal fresh board markers kind of thing.  I had an unforgettable,  invaluable two weekend long induction at the children’s’ charity where I volunteer, to help me gear myself to kids at risk in ways that would make them and me comfortable. Thank you, fate, for that tutelage. Just this Friday I had an induction at my new gym to find out which buttons to push on the cardio equipment. I was harangued into it by the sales guy who kept citing “health & safety,” which, as any resident of these fair isles knows, is a phrase by necessity followed by “regulations.”

The thing about the UK is that it’s also a cover-your-ass culture. Covering one’s arse is an extreme sport here. I’ve just had to pay £186 in “office and inventory fees” to have a gorgeous sweet Polish chick from my new flat’s estate agency go through every single thing in my very minor bachelorette-ette-ette down to the crap kettle and perma-stained Ikea trash can. God forbid that same kettle not be here when I move out, along with the vintage microwave. I was also shown the never-to-be-turned off switch for the electrical pump. Yes, this place is too old for modern drains and needs remedial electric draining. Only Miss K didn’t mention that. She wasn’t sure what the mystery switch did actually. We surmised it had to do with the bathroom fan and I left it on. Luckily so. The entire building would have flooded in an hour if I had given in to my anti-bathroom fan bigotry. So said the maintenance officer who arrived at my door at 10pm my first night after my downstairs neighbour reported a flood for entirely unrelated reasons (that have to do with crazy fierce water pressure, who knew, and the British tendency to simply hoist hand held sprays up high vs a proper shower, and the necessity never to leave such shower sprays unattended when you decide to fill up the half bath while you’re choosing which is your sock drawer instead). The maintenance officer was formal; he thought it best I trade my towel for track pants before opening my door.

What am I trying to say? That I’m three inductions down, and I obviously should have had a thorough induction to my own flat. Dollars to donuts you’ll get an induction or two if you come here. Here’s to all of us figuring out what the hell we’re doing before we get started. And to that nice young personal trainer explaining again how to play the fish game on the rowing machine. And to me giving someone an induction one day. I’ll make it a goody. My fear is gone. I’m after induction suction.

I’m in the midst of a move so the fact that I’m blogging at all is extraordinarily narcissistic.  The least I can do is keep it short.

#1 Heard from an Oncoming Jogger in Hyde Park

These were two thirty-something dudes running. They were big, burly types in an Eton-rugby-team-now-hedge-funders kind of way. They were pounding fast in my direction but I had time to hear one of them say to the other, “…Swan Lake. It was my first time at the ballet. I absolutely LOVED it.” Would this come out of the mouth of a Bay Streeter with a six-pack? Doubt it. Case closed.

#2 Heard from a Schoolboy After Football in Hyde Park

These were eleven or twelve-year olds from my brother’s old school, actually, which uses Hyde Park as its sports ground. Bypassing a post-game crocodile I heard one boy say to another, “You’re over-exaggerating, Andre…No, you really are!” At first I wanted to stop and say, “Yo, kid, exaggerating is by its nature overstating something. You can’t over-exaggerate.” Then I cut the little guy some slack. What manner of Canadian schoolboy engages in even such mild sophistry? No kid who doesn’t want to get the crap pounded out of him. Case closed.

3. Twenty-something Gent Reading a Novel on the Tube

Okay, it’s not that you don’t see young guys here with big books in their hands quite often, which always gladdens my heart. But this chap was reading Birdsong. Sure it’s part of a war trilogy. But still – ladies and gentlemen I give you fiction, I give you fiction with a delicacy of title, in the hands of a young male of the species. Seen that on the Bloor line lately? I didn’t think so. Case closed.

I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m gloating. Living here reveals my philistinism a lot too often for gloating. I’m just sooooo digging the cultivation is all. Don’t get me started on the history…

Yesterday I asked a gentleman to do something that is, in London terms, seriously above and beyond. Forget the fact that it involved a queue forty-five minutes long.  Forget that I wheedled a fifty-minute jog out of him beforehand. Yesterday afternoon I dragged my favourite poor fellow to…south London.

It’s worse than Brooklyn. It’s worse than The Beaches. It’s worse than North Van. It’s almost as bas as les banlieues. For most north, west and east Londoners, going to south London creates this crazy homing pigeon vibe that soon conquers the head completely…. “Get me back across the river! What the frick am I doing this side of the river? Get me the hell out of South London NOW!!!”

We had just cause to journey. It was the last day of Dulwich Picture Gallery’s magnificently comprehensive Tom Thomson +  Group of Seven show about which critics had raved. They call the Group of Seven “Canadian Impressionists” here. I thought the place would be crawling with Canucks but there were Brits in droves. I should have known because even poetry readings scoop a crowd. For all I know even poetry readings in Southwark. West Dulwich is, of course, extremely ritzy. One of those rivals-Kensington-for-splendour places, blah blah. For whatever motivation, hundreds and thousands of Londoners saw fit to flock to Dulwich yesterday and months beforehand to take in the Canadian shield renderings of unusual luminosity. Do Tom. Go Lawren. Go A.Y.

Personally, I was in search of a desk calendar and didn’t find one so I’m more rife with bitterness than patriotism. They’d sold out of wall calendars that morning which is fine. “You can get those at dollar stores in Canada,” I explained. “Wow, I can feel the black fly massacre,” I also elucidated, when confronted with a crepuscular Algonquin birch grove of pristine elegance.  “I feel like I’m on my way to my grandparents!” I exclaimed at a groundbreaking Laurentian vista.  “Emily Carr had a pet monkey called Woo,” I mused over a stylized Gulf Island.

Impossible that I should have brought my finest self to south London but I’m glad someone brought such wondrous Canadian art to Dulwich. ”The Group of Seven is a household name in Canada,” the didactics asserted. True that. I’m sure few of my fellow art pilgrims doubted why.

“Have you ever been out into the real wilderness?” my companion inquired.

“Not really,” I answered. “But some of my friends have.” So it is to be Canadian. Nice to be reminded.

When I bought my ticket to move to London I needed to make it a round trip to take advantage of the best fare. That was easy. I left in May with as many summer clothes as I could stuff into the two bags Air Canada Tango then allowed. I figured by October I’d be back in Canada with said summer togs knowing London wasn’t my thing, or I’d be back to Charlottetown with two empty bags ready to cram my winter stuff in there to take back to London right after Thanksgiving.

Obviously, I headed back to London October 2009 with my mitts and parka and whatever else I needed to survive. As I did that Christmas, the following summer, the next October, the following Christmas, last June, this past Thanksgiving, and three days ago.

While my Bloomsbury job solidified, while my pack of London buddies grew, I felt more and more grounded in N7 then W2. Having family history here helped, and relatives in Europe. London wasn’t not home, that was sure. What more London represented to me personally I could wait to find out. My winds would blow; I’d hitch a ride; eventually they’d stop blowing.

Something gave way this last trip back to Heathrow via Halifax. I felt a bit sick with fear, actually, at the thought of not being able to return to the UK. I realized with something of a thrilled jolt that not coming back to London would feel like the most godawful exile. Toronto is great, PEI is great, New York would have been great, but London is where I want to belong. No where else can fascinate me as much, challenge me as much, or feed me as reliably much in the sophistication, history and verve departments. Nowhere else has such ineffabilities.

Let me be frank. Yesterday morning I laid in bed and heard bells. Gorgeous pealing bells. I asked the gentleman in whose neighbourhood these bells were tolling from whence they might hail. He was not able to answer along the lines of, “Why, those are St Cuthbert’s bells,” or “St Bartholomew’s strikes again,” or “St Cressida’s has the oldest bells in London.” Said gent said “some church.” Which a lady of even my modest powers of deduction had determined. No matter. The dear gent then opened his window to let the bells pour in.

Ladies and chaps, I give you a gorgeous old art deco apartment block off Kensington Church Street. I give you tea in thinnish cups. I give you bells chiming in a New Years Day morning like our hearts depended on it. Go ahead and trust your pleasure, those bells seem to ring. You get a London future if that’s what you’ve set your mind to and know it, they added.  A bit of Radio 4 only rammed that home since, quite frankly, bright, chatty, alacrity-loaded BBC Radio 4 chimes like bells for me a lot of the time, too.

Sorry to go all Quasimodo crossed with Georgy Girl but I figured you might as well know – THIS mad island or bust, ideally its capital, and that is bloody well that. Please fates, I beg you, let me stay here where newspapers are chock full of the seriously gripping, where grass is green in January, where elegant men with pitifully Benny Hill strains to their senses of humour happily open windows for me when I can risk a breeze.

I don’t need luck; I need London.

When you’re small it’s all about Christmas morning. Christmas Eve is nice but you what you really want are your little hands on a stocking – as a precursor to those Santa gifts you’re allowed to open once your mom and dad have had their tea and coffee, as a preliminary to those family gifts you unwrap once the grownups have enjoyed brunch, and a couple of your father’s eggnog cocktails, and cranked the Hallelujah chorus.

After the presents there’s the feast. After the turkey and seconds there’s something kick-ass on teevee of the Julie Andrews variety, and the grownups are still laughing their heads off, and no one sees you filching Turtles and pistachios: the pleasures go on and on until you go burping and sated to your brother’s other bunk bed. 

Yes, when you’re a kid there’s enough of a bloom left on your new toys, games and gadgets to enjoy playing with them, or your neighbourhood pal’s versions thereof, all Boxing Day long. So Boxing Day isn’t a trauma by any means. And there’s the sandwich thing, which is pleasant. But Boxing day is no harbinger of joy.

Until you turn twenty-two and develop a Vogue addiction and nothing, nothing says happy-merry-joy-oh-joy quite like reductions at Holt Renfrew, half price at Prada, and Everything Must Go at MiuMiu.  All hail Boxing Day: childless urban heaven.

Yes, you’re right, I used to think New Years Eve was the singletons’ real Christmas…until I spent the best December 31st evening of my life alone hugging the family spaniel listening to Leonard Cohen on a loop. Screw prosecco headaches from then on. The best part about New Years are the resolutions and they don’t kick in until January 1st. For true seasonal joy, bring on the shoe boxes.

Except I’m in Prince Edward Island, where they wince out eight annual months of Sunday shopping maximum and it stops at Christmas.  Here in PEI, on December 26th you can go to a Needs store and buy a loaf of Wonderbread, or a  bag of Cheetos, or batteries. The cutthroat race for drastic reductions that truly smacks of holiday must wait until the 27th in these parts.

But by December 27th I’ve lost my materialistic glow. And there’s barely any label whoring to be done here no matter when, unless you count LuluLemon. Thanks to Charlottetown I’ve lost a load of my Yule fervor. There’s not a lot in Boxing Day for me with pretension in such miserably short supply. Alas poor Boxing Day, I once plundered ye well.

It all comes down to the solstice. Rejoice, behold, let there be glorious, heartwarming, steadily increasing, beneficial, gorgeous LIGHT. Everybody, the sun king is born. Woop woop woop woop…

When we were growing up my mom had a beautiful repertoire of Christmas goodies. For herself she made a fruit cake, emphasis on red and green glace, mercifully full of almonds. For the tree she baked gingerbread men and ladies which we decorated liberally with the old icing piper. We threaded curly ribbon through the holes in their head, hung them from the stiffer branches, and after December 25th proper, started to pick them off.

For everyone within reason Mom made her exquisite shortbread from the Five Roses cookbook – some round, some with serrated edges, some bells, all with mini bits of that glace, or in the case of the bells silver dragees - all too small to justify not having another one. Think butter and sugar with a bit of melty crumbly texture.

And for who knows who, Mom made the most misshapen, sad little mince tarts imaginable. No one else’s mother made mince tarts nor any of my maternal aunts. It must have been one of Mom’s romantically adopted traditions. Or all her sisters had the sense to quit it with their mother’s old tart notions. Mom’s mince tarts, butter tarts’ evils twins if you will, were the Christmas treat of last resort, eaten when the tree was stripped of all its ginger people and red delicious apples, eaten only when the fruitcake had no visible almonds, eaten when every last filbert had been cracked. I seem to remember a boozy kick, never to my mind all that pleasant an experience, and that typical raisin squish, and pastry that was always just that little, subtle, tiny bit burnt.  Bless Mom, really, for her sweet intentions.

I spent forty some years assuming I didn’t much like mince pie. Then I came to London and discovered that in the noughties, for all I know dating back to Dickens, UK in December goes mulled wine and mince pie crazy.  Everywhere you go you smell cinnamon sticks and allspice. There are Christmas get togethers serving nothing but MW and MP and not one other thing. Case in point: the pre-choral concert reception for my old school that took place last early December.

Man, was I excited to attend. I loved the notion of throwing my arms around long-lost school pals. I headed down to the Belgravia church bubbling with anticipation at the hugs to come. I stood in a corner and looked for acquaintances. I peered and strained. Nothing doing. No one. It’s not exactly politic to wander up to someone substantially one’s junior and ask, “Are you class of ’79?” I dared not spoil any 39-year-old’s silly season.

I forewent the mulled wine because, truth be told, I’m not crazy about wine in general. Thank god, however, for the senior school girls passing around trays of mince pies. These weren’t lattice topped like Mom’s. These had sugary pastry cases. Mince pies are so much better warm…Mince pies are so GOOD!!!! I had no one to hug but I stood there gobbling. I believe, without exaggeration, cowering in my corner with no “old girls” to yak to, I got through five tarts. I could be wrong. It could have been seven.

It hasn’t stopped there. This year I want to try Heston Blumenthal for Waitrose’s pine inflected version. I pilgrimmaged to the most chic of organic bakeries in Pimlico for their rendition, oh so flakey, served with a brandy butter quenelle.  Where I pitched to a gent, with whom I’d been seriously considering a cross-London mince pie crawl, that we, gasp, make our own.

A recipie was sourced from a supreme home cook in Cornwall. Tins were purchased. Plus: a pastry brush; the makings of, yes, pastry from scratch; jars of outrageously overpriced Whole Foods organic veggie suet mince; and…I don’t know what else since my cognitive overload began at this point and I settled into numbskull sous-chef status.

The way we marched into that kitchenette, god it was so brave. We got orange rind flecked dough, we got said dough refrigerated, then we got it rollered, cookie cuttered, and teaspooned, then egg brushed and floppy lidded and forked. We got the first batch in the oven…long enough for our bloody delicious tarts to stick, irrevocably and inexorably, to the bottom of the tart tin. Absolutely scrumptuous – after a Cro Magnon like gouging of which I will spare you further details.

The second batch? Well, you know those small kitchenette ovens that do double duty? Convection oven and microwave in one? Do not microwave your raw mince tarts into completion is all we can say. I’ve never known something microwaved to billow that much smoke.

I headed home with one quasi intact tart out of 12. Mom would be proud.