Week 383: if cake is the answer, what is the question?

Went to vote in the police and crime commissioner byelection. There was a huge queue, the like of which I’d never seen for a proper election, let alone a two-bit Mickey Mouse sinecure one … it seemed disproportionately whatever the opposite of a sausage fest is, and I realised that it was actually a queue to see an intimate performance by the boyband Blue. (The polling station was deserted, accessed by a carpeted ramp that creaked as I stomped fatly along it.)

There’s a market stall named Jake’s Kitchen, whose motto/slogan is “because cake is always the answer”. That’s bang wrong – sometimes the answer is 1914, Borussia Dortmund, or cress. But if the question is “what would rhymes with Jake?”, cake is the answer, so why didn’t they call it Jake’s Cakes? It may be that some of the things they sell are technically not cake – pastries, tarts, biscuits etc – but then why is the slogan what it is?

Andy Burnham, Wonderwall, and have you noticed the scouse Stephen Graham has replaced the cockney Dexter Fletcher after many years as the voice of the McDonalds adverts? It’s pretty thin, but surely a newspaper columnist will tie the things together and say the ascendancy of North West England.