The provision of cake for one’s colleagues on one’s own birthday is a curious tradition of the staffroom, not least because of the huge social pressure that it puts upon an individual who should be being made to feel special.

It’s not an optional requirement. If you fail to provide cake when everyone knows it is your birthday, you may as well tell everyone that you have enough friends, thanks, and you don’t really like anyone at work.

Pretending it isn’t your birthday won’t cut it either. You might make it to breaktime, but Pete from PE will eventually end up telling everyone that you just turned 40, and the whole room will turn in your direction scanning your person for cake. And all they will find is a plastic box full of last night’s stir fry. You can’t put a candle in stir fry. You can’t cut stir fry into 30 slices and distribute it on paper plates. You can’t have a communal staff moment over stir fry.

You’ll be branded a disgrace.

But even when you do bring cake, there is, inevitably, trouble.

What do two “sharing buckets” of caramel slices that you picked up from M&S on the way into school say to those you work with? They say that you forgot to get your colleagues cake for your birthday and rushed somewhere last-minute. They say that you are a horrible human being.

And if you did plan ahead, what about the size of the cake? If this is for the departmental or phase team, have you brought enough for everyone? Because if that circular sugar bap is not going to provide enough morale-boosting slices for all, the level of passive aggressiveness coming your way will be worse than even a Year 9 tutor group could muster.

Then there are the allergic and the vegan team members. Sam, the new NQT, spent 20 minutes telling you why she went vegan and now you’ve offered her a cream bun. Stacie has been allergic to nuts for the entire five years that you have worked together, and you’ve just presented her with a slab of walnut surprise. You’re a monster.

The coronavirus should, in theory, have put a hold on all of this. It is difficult to hand out baked goods on paper towels across a two-metre gap. But even a global pandemic cannot stand in the way of cake.

So what to do? Here’s a little trick I learned from a wickedly delightful woman called Jane. Each year, she would arrive at school with some old cracker boxes that she claimed were full of a wonderful array of cakes. Just as the crowd formed, she’d loudly say how her children were really looking forward to hearing some reviews ... as they had done the baking. Unsupervised.

The crowd, she told me, would always scatter: child-made baked goods are kryptonite for teachers. A few courageous (desperate) teachers would eat the single cake she had actually brought, and she would then take the other boxes home as empty as they had been when they arrived. We should all be more Jane. It’s not cruel. It’s not a lie. It’s just deserts for a profession that thinks extorting cake out of someone just because it is their birthday is acceptable.

Luke Marsden is a teacher in the South of England

This article originally appeared in the 16 October 2020 issue under the headline “Don’t like my caramel slices? Then shut your cake hole”