First class buns

He was a short man and has resolved to always bring a stool or small stair whenever he was asked to be a judge at a Cake or preserves competition. All too frequently in the early days he had found himself jumping to reach a slice of coffee and walnut cake and ending up bringing the whole thing down around his ears.

These days however, his diminutive nature was widely known to people on the scene and it wasn't altogether uncommon for him to have been given a piggyback by a local farmer so he could grasp the cake betwixt his chubby fingers with minimal fuss.

But today represented a new competition and no real provision has been made to accommodate him. He therefore effortlessly opened the stepladder, climbed to the top and surveyed the table of baked goods with a trembling lip. It never got any easier gazing at the array of food before him.

He had always maintained to his family and friends that he did not only hate cakes but feared them. His whole life had been arranged so as to avoid any mention or sight of them. Each journey meticulously planned to avoid passing a bakery. Each party only ever attended after an enquiry revealed a lack of cake on the buffet table.

However, his mother, a still mighty influence in her ninety-first year, had insisted he confront his fear and become a judge of the very thing he so despised. Initially he had vomited so hard that he had begun to bleed from the effort. The first few events were marred somewhat by the heady combination of red-flecked sick and cake. But lately his stomach had given up the battle and would tolerate the baked items more securely.
 
They would lay leaden in the very pit of his chest for some time but that was some considerable improvement from projectile vomiting.

And so he stood, with laser pointer in his trembling hand and brought the tiny red beam to rest upon a dishevelled carrot cake. "I will force down a slab of that ginger shit" he bellowed.