Lemon Meringue City

My lemon meringue city. To me Cape Town, my city, my home town, is like a lemon meringue in the cake shop. The top of the meringue so beautifully sweet and light and sunkissed and white – like the part of Cape Town only the few get to know. It is the beauty of the city – and the cake – that catches the eye, the selling point, the face the Mother City shows off to those not from here or those who can afford this sweet life. It takes a whirlwind to create this meringue – fast deals and jetsetters, made light and frothy with the air kisses of social butterflies.

The middle of the meringue, the filling, is sweet and sour like the lives of the middle class. Just a enough sweetness to make it palatable, liveable and comfortable in Cape Town suburbia. But the sour note of working so very hard to send your kids to THAT school, to go on THAT holiday and to eat at THAT restaurant.  You can pull off an occasional night in the magical meringue world, but don’t even think that you belong there.  Your pocket will feel it, your ego will feel it.  You are a couple of missteps away from how your parents lived. So sourly you go back to working hard for your next brief taste of the sweet life.

Then the base, the foundation of it all. A beaten down mass, but when you look closely a million individuals/crumbs united in making it all run smoothly.  In a perfect meringue, the base holds together, so that the filling and meringue can look pretty on top. Butter it up enough – butter them up enough – and the base holds firm and the entire cake hold firm. But it can all fall apart so easily. It  needs all crumbs to stick together, to know their place. No crumbs in the filling please, and definitely no crumbs in the meringue.

So, the perfect slice of lemon meringue is when the three layers are visibly separate and hold firm to where they belong. However, the perfect mouthful of lemon meringue is when it all mixes together – meringue, filling and base. And in this Cape Town coffee shop, if you choose the lemon meringue, know that while we will start out separate and holding firm to where we think we belong, after some coffee, lots of conversation and many mouthfuls of lemon meringue, we will all be mixed together, all layers, all voices and it will be delicious.