Dialogue: If this is a slice of heaven, it's a bit rummy

Someone has sent me "a slice of heaven." It is a cake, or to be more precise a "World-famous Tortuga Rum Cake." It was baked in Cayman Island, which according to my globe is just to the left of Jamaica. Up a bit towards Cuba lies The Isle of Youth, which sounds grisly.

The cake isn't grisly. It's rich with rhetoric. I shall let it speak for itself. The "slice of heaven" is a "Premium Quality Rum Cake Produced by a Famous Rum Company." It is of such premium quality that it has become not only "The Cayman's Number 1 Gift and Souvenir Item" but - and cop this - it was voted "a must-buy" by Carnival Cruise Line Currents magazine. I wonder how I've got through 43 years without one.

The one I've got is also "the authentic and original Cayman Island Rum Cake." Before you sneer be aware that inauthentic cakes are in circulation. Apparently "all high-quality products attract pirates." By which I presume it does not mean that Errol Flynn is forever swinging aboard the bakeries of Cayman Island replete with cutlass, bandanna and stubble and making off with the rum cakes, but rather that inferior bakers are knocking up Victoria sponges, dousing them in cheap rum and trying to pass them off as the real thing.

According to the Tortuga Rum Company, "there is only '1' Tortuga Rum Cake," and I have got '1'. I am excited, grateful and puzzled - excited because it is so splendid a cake, grateful because all gifts are good, and puzzled because I have no idea who sent it to me.

Whoever it was is generous. The catalogue tells me that "quality is priceless," but the price list tells me than I can pick up one of these cakes for a mere $US55 (which at the present rate of exchange translates as the GDP of Auckland). The number of friends I have in Cayman Island is more or less '0'. But I do know a vet in nearby Florida. At university we knew him as Smuggler for reasons which I can't recall. Nor, I am sure, can he, since he is one of the most remarkable amnesiacs ever to hold down a job.

I remember how a neighbour once leaned over the fence and asked Smuggler if he could pick a few of the plums that were rotting on a tree in Smuggler's back garden. That evening Smuggler came home to find a stall outside the neighbour's house selling plums. He thought they looked nice and bought two pounds.

So although Smuggler is the most charming and generous of friends, the chances of him deciding to send me a cake are slight and the chances of him remembering my address are '0'.

But, of course, the cake donor does not have to live anywhere near Cayman Island. Thanks to the wonders of the internet you can order one of these cakes from anywhere in the world and send it to anywhere else in the world.

And I think it's all rather exciting.

For here is rampant modernity. In the global marketplace you can pay a preposterous sum of money to buy a remote cake and send it somewhere more remote. It is love by credit card.

The cake offers everything we lack. It is plump with puffery and dripping with tradition. It promises the romance of distant sun-soaked islands where the natives grin and the rum flows like yesterday. It suggests authenticity, a solid, earthy idyll of natural tastes and continuous living and primitive simplicity and unparalleled sweetness.

Thus it gratifies all the cravings of an urban commercial world from which the soul has been wrenched by the constant quest for money and the ever-increasing pace. It offers the chance to bless your friends with a flick of the mouse. The monstrous price assuages guilt. The ludicrous language tugs at a dream. It is a gesture of romance, a nod towards betterness, a parody of love, transcontinental generosity as impersonal as an office block.

Here is a world too rich and too remote and too interconnected to be rich or friendly or truly connected. Here is the grand scale of pointlessness. And, though I don't wish to sound ungrateful, it's a pretty ordinary cake.

I have just eaten a big slice. The dogs laid their warm beguiling heads in my lap so I tossed them each a lump.

With a wag of the tail and a single gulp they swallowed between them about $10 worth of cake, then returned to the sofa to sleep wisely in the warmth of the spring sun.