(every new year's eve my father would make choux pastry & pipe it into rows of S shapes & buns that he'd bake so slowly they would remain as pale as possible & he'd split the buns in two & stick the S & the halves of the bun into a ball of whipped cream & spoon the ball with the pastry stuck into it onto a sauced filled with sieved raspberry coulis & when the waiters walked to your table with the saucer held up high & swooped down to serve you the dessert it was revealed that the flamboyancy of the waiter's gait from the kitchen to the table would nudge the cream across the plate so that a white swirl would slice through the red liquid & the people would gasp because it looked very much like a little swan swimming across a red pond & maybe that's when I thought about being an artist but dad left before he could show me how to make the swan trick work) (so I started reading instead)