THE FIRST STAGE
"reflection of a profound reality"

Back in the late noughties, there wasn't much in the way of ready-made vegan provisions. If you wanted an animal-free centrepiece, you had to apply your hunter-gatherer instincts to rare cookbooks and hipster pantries, pay through your teeth for plant-based substitutes, then follow the recipe to the absolute letter. It was the same year that Amy Adams portrayed Julie Powell in Julia & Julia, professing the allure that the stability of baking provides in an increasingly uncertain world, via the most Ephronic monologue that doesn't involve a man. (The Bechamel Test?) I was seeking that nirvana through a vegan shortcrust baklava.

By my own admission, I'm not a baker. But it was a friend's birthday party, someone only a couple of years older than I was, who had managed to achieve an adult aesthetic I clung to in my dreams and never reached in my nightmares. She was a great baker. So I'd make a great cake and a vegan one at that. Partly so I would definitely have something to eat but also, as I loved to do at that time, prove a point.

Cooking is a different skillset to baking. Especially vegetables and grains. You can wing it with enough saltfatacidheat. But this non-filo version of one of the most famous things you can do with pistachio refused my improvisation. The pastry refused to ribbon, instead making wheaty slabs, while the pistachio and rose water paste turned into an unappetising shade of brown. I switched between looking at the photo in the recipe book and my result. My then-fiancé reassured me that it would be great. Besides, if we didn't leave imminently, we'd be late.

I heaved it onto the table spread. It made a dull but undeniable thud on contact. If it looks like a brick and handles like a brick... The glossy salads and canapes winked at me. Clearing my throat, I cut myself a thick, nutty wedge, stepping back to pronounce, "Help yourselves!"

THE SECOND STAGE
"the sign is an unfaithful copy"

When I told the headmaster of my that I was leaving for a sixth-form college that offered philosophy and film courses, he blinked.

"What are you going to do with that?"

He wasn't sneering. He genuinely couldn't imagine. I was going to find out, I told him.

Thankfully, we live in a world where a shared reality based on truth hasn't eroded due to unregulated media production.

Where does irony fit in all this? I used it as a defence for such a long time. But I was retreating, wasn't I? All this distance.

It was when I was studying philosophy that I fell in love with another philosopher, a little older, radically leaning and, most surprisingly, in love with me as well. I knew I had so much to learn from his way of seeing the world. Something peeped in me when he raged one morning because I hadn't said good night to him before falling asleep, having felt so cosy and safe in his arms - and a beer-and-weed haze. I proposed to him not long after that. How could it get any better than this?

He taught me about how he saw the world, how he saw my behaviour, how strange it was that I didn't want him to come along every evening I spent with my friends, how if I did have an evening to myself, I'd come back to find him blind drunk and crying, how I didn't know that if someone says they'll hurt themselves if you do something, that that's as abusive as if they say that they'll hurt you.

My favourite verb is to realise.

THE THIRD STAGE
"the absence of a profound reality"

Where I live now, there are seven artisan bakeries within a ten-minute walk.

Is it cake? Is it cake?! IS IT CAKE?!??!!?!!

The soft plunge of the knife. The reveal.
Real things cannot be easily taken apart.

THE FOURTH STAGE
"no relationship to any reality whatsoever"

A cake is meant to be shared. It quickly became clear that the first few polite bites would be the last anyone else would take. So I ate the entire baklava myself, steadily over the evening. I'm sure that I was seen going back for seconds and then some, but the shame of having made this thing exist, offer it to other people as something edible and good, quite literally outweighed the risk of being seen as a greedy pig. I saw my then-fiancé share an eye-roll with another guest. That confirmed it. A relief, really. I was doing everyone a favour, destroying the evidence. The pastry that I'd done my best to delicately lattice congealed, the ruins sinking into the depths of my gut.

It didn't occur to me that I could just throw it away.