In which redefining yourself is like the time Britain got into a fight with its tax code over whether Jaffa cakes were in fact cake or if they were cookies*
*I know. I don’t care.
I don’t often go back to a lot of places when I travel. Even if it’s nearly the same, like when I did the bus tour of Scotland with Amy that I’d done with my sister more than half a decade earlier, we stayed in different places and went to see different things. And we danced a lot more. I like the places I go, but there are so many things I want to see. And yet last April, I found myself looking at flights to Scotland and flats to rent in Thurso, a little town on the north coast where I had stayed before.
Let me tell you about Jaffa cakes. They are the platonic ideal of a tea cookie, and I’ve eaten my way through eight countries’ worth of tea cookies, so I know. Softer than the Monte Carlo, morally superior to every variation of the Nice biscuit, less emotionally perplexing than tablet, and somehow less pretentious than Peek Freans. They are easily consumed in two bites, don’t fall apart when you dip them in your tea, and can, if required, be eaten in one fell swoop to prevent you having to share them. The thing they are not, however, is: cookies.
My flight was delayed, so even before I left Canada, I knew I’d be on the late train. The light was grey and fading when we left Inverness, and by the time we got to Thurso, it was literally a dark and stormy night. There were no taxis waiting for us, not that I expected one anyway, but I wasn’t worried. I had a fancy new backpack and a rough idea of where I was going (which was nice as once I got off the train, I didn’t have the internet). I helped a few other tourists find their way to their hotels, and then turned on to the little alleyway where my flat was. The rads were already off for the night when I got in, but had been traveling for 24 hours, so I didn’t really care.
The construction of a Jaffa cake is simple. The first layer is a dense Genoise sponge. On top of that is a dollop of orange jam, from which the cookie gets its name. The jam is sealed in by chocolate. Like everything else in the food world, Jaffa cakes have been victims of “shrinkflation”, and are now 5cm in diameter instead of 5.5cm. The jam has decreased comparatively. While that is an extremely frustrating result of capitalism (THIS IS WHY WE USED TO HAVE BREAD LAWS, PEOPLE), it’s not actually the reason why England got into a fight with its tax code over them.
I’ve changed a lot since 2017. That trip was my first adventure in years, and it was a test to see if my post-injury self could have adventures at all. I took the train to Thurso because it was almost as far as you could get on the train, but the best place to stay if you wanted to do some light walking and also take a ferry to Orkney. Creatively, I was in a good place. I had drafted The Afterward, I was preparing to launch That Inevitable Victorian Thing, and I was about a week and a half into planning the first book in the Padmé trilogy. My career was at an all-time high. Everything was going to fall apart in September, but I didn’t know that yet. It was July and I could walk and climb and ride a horse, and I felt amazing about everything.
The reason Jaffa cakes came under fire for their status is that cake with a chocolate coating is a zero-rated item and cookies with a chocolate coating are not. This means they are taxed differently. In 1991, there was a court case to determine which category Jaffa cakes belonged to. I like to imagine it was hilarious. McVitie’s actually made a Jaffa cake cake to demonstrate the cakeness of their product, and in the end, it was determined that Jaffa cakes are cakes. They remain incredibly popular tea cookies.
The last time I was in Thurso, my name meant something. I was EK Johnston, award winning, #1 New York Times Bestselling author. I’m not that person anymore. Now I’m EK Johnston, mediocre sales, bottom of the midlist in an industry where the midlist is dying, “we can’t launch a non-Star Wars EK Johnston book”. I can’t trade on the accolades from 2016 and before much longer. There are still people who will take a risk on me, but we all know it’s not going to last forever. I have to make a change. For tax purposes. I don’t know what that change is. Now, I sit on the sea wall and look at the ocean, and feel like Thurso 2017 was in another universe altogether. I don't want it to feel like that forever.
Nobody who eats Jaffa cakes really cares if they are cake or cookies. Sometimes, capitalism and human nature clash in bizarre ways. We need to categorize, assign worth, try to limit the appalling greed of corporations, but at the end of the day, a Jaffa cake is a Geonoise sponge, a dollop of orange jam, and a chocolate coating. I crossed an ocean and spent eight hours on a train to eat them on a specific bench.
I came back to Thurso to see if I was a different person. And I am, in some ways. The business side of publishing has played merry havoc on my mental health (and, like, also everyone else’s). But the important parts are still in here somewhere, and I want to dig them up. The first time I came here, it was to see if I could come here at all. This time, I came to see if I could sit on the sea wall and stare at Hoy and find the girl who looked at that island and turned it into a space station. I came to eat Jaffa cakes and not care about the taxes, and hope that if I could strip the business out of tea cookies, I could do it to myself. I know I'm in here somewhere. I don’t know how I'll do it (I have some ideas), but I do love Jaffa cakes, and it’s always going to be worth the trip.
The preorder campaign for CRIMSON CLIMB ends on October 3rd. You will get a personalized bookplate with your copy of the book. I am not going on tour, so this is pretty much the only way to get a signed copy (unless you're at HalCon in October!)
US Preorders: Loudmouth Books
Canadian Preorders: Fanfare Books