URGENT: The first rule of Cake Club is, You do not talk about Cake Club

The second rule of Cake club?

Guess.

Cake Clubbers everywhere must be made aware that their culture and identity and values are being assaulted by the recent unravelling of orderliness in our beloved alternate office reality. No matter if the person on the bus beside you is sporting suspicious bruises and claims to know Tyler Durden, under no circumstances should you converse with him.

Discipline, I'm sure you all will agree, must be maintained.

Straight from the farm

Podunks. Hillbillies. Mountain Williams. Call us what you like but you will find some good things in Smoky Mountain trailer parks besides Jack Daniels and Dolly Parton albums. Namely, these gooey lovely pecan sticky buns that we used to eat back home in Kentucky.

This week we are celebrating:

1) Nadine being back, all lovely and tan, from that place they named the blue liquor after!

2) The arrival of a compatriot! Welcome to Alex, whose native New Jersey is a much more dignified state than mine. Here's hoping that her more elevated provenance will increase the respectability of all her American CEPR colleagues.

3) The departure of Robyn! Well, of course, we are not technically happy about this, since we have loved having her around to buffer our incompetence with transferring telephone calls. But she is beginning a bigger, better, mosquito-centred career where she will undoubtedly find great success and professional satisfaction examining larvae and whatnot.

Don't forget to come to the pub on Friday night to toast the three ladies of honour!

I love a warm pig belly for my aching feet

Dear loyal CEPR Cake Clubbers, or as I prefer to call you, my dear subjects,

Social scientists agree that a regime's maturity is confirmed by the successful and peaceful transfer of power. Some self-congratulation seems in order, then, after the abdication of our dearly departed Head Chef and the coronation of, well, me, your dearly resident one.

Social scientists might also tell you that crucial to the new leader's success is a swift and outstanding assertion of authority to quickly earn the respect and, yes, love of her subjects. And so I am using this, my inaugural message, to inform you that the realm has been reordered. Henceforth you may expect benign authoritarianism rather than megalomania. Unlike my predecessor, whose Mussolinian rhetoric established confectionary discipline but stifled a whole generation of Cake Club ingenuity, I prefer to model myself on that true patroness of sticky authoritarian lassitude, Marie Antoinette. (This also means that any pretender to my throne must be prepared to impose deposition by guillotine. And we all know that such barbarian outrages are simply no longer fashionable.)

Thus I hereby honour women autocrats the world over. And as a gesture of my maternalistic benevolence, I will replace Nadine (who is on holiday) to deliver our next Cake. Robert is commissioned with providing the pig belly for my aching feet.