New Girl's email had the subject: "eminently bloggable".

"No! I won't go back!" Man Hands was adamant.

New Girl was asking Man Hands to return to the cake shop at which he had placed the order for their wedding cake and request that the silver balls shown as decoration in the catalogue not be included on their cake. Shame, really. I'm rather fond of cachous.

Man Hands had been very good and ventured forth to a cake shop where he perused options for his and New Girl's wedding cake. Then, with the cake decided upon under New Girl's steady, guiding hand, he'd gone back to the shop and ordered it. Understandably, this was a somewhat trying experience; the richness of emotion and trauma perhaps not properly conveyed by those two simple sentences. However, having taken the bull by the horns and the bit between the teeth - two action I'm not entirely certain can or should be performed simultaneously - Man Hands accepted his responsibility with gusto.

He found himself, a man alone in a cake shop without a woman to make him feel small and uncertain, filled with confidence and a certain jauntiness. This cake ordering bizzo is a wheeze! And at the end of the whole ordeal he may have even said as much to the proprietress. I see him in my mind's eye, leaning with rakish charm and elan on the bench top, confiding to the good shop woman that he couldn't for the life of him fathom what all the fuss was about.

So why with confidence like that was he so unwilling to return and make a small adjustment to the order? Because having imparted this bit of new-found wisdom, he heard one of the bakers (male) turn to another baker (also male) and say in a stage whisper:

"They always come back."