Oh, What A Day!

Life Is A Bowl of Cherries Sweet!
Demel's Annatorte
Demel K. & K. Hofzuckerbäckerei
Demel Royal and Imperial Confectioners

How in heaven did I earn such a treat?
I elucubrated until the wee hours of the morning! *

You say that was not reason enough?
Well, I had lusted after that cake
for what must have been at least a hundred times,
and a hundred times over,
and it never was the right moment.
Until yesterday, 5pm,
when this little voice in me
finally softened, and whispered,
"Do so if thou lust!"


* In the cold light of the morning after,
I felt the need for penance, though,
and went to do some research about the origins
of that beautiful word "elucubrate".
Here's what I learned,
thanks to Google and Wikipedia,

"Elucubrate, to doe a thing by candlelight",
that is how the English lexicographer Henry Cockeram defined it in his 1623
"The English dictionarie, or an interpreter of hard English words".
His fellow countryman, the author Francis Quarles,
clothed burning the midnight oil twelve years later, in 1635,
in these beautiful words:
"Wee spend our mid-day sweat, or mid-night oyle;
Wee tyre the night in thought; the day in toyle."

*

Photographed at Demel's
Kohlmarkt 14
November 5, 2008