August… and the weather as I write is positively balmy. Time to discard the insulating layers and expose lily-white limbs to the sun.
I only do it for ten minutes at a time (for the vitamin ‘D’ you understand and fear of freckles,) in the decent obscurity of my own backyard. Sudden sleevelessness and tightlessness elsewhere might reveal to the public that I’m neither tanned nor toned and lead them to suppose I’m just emerging from a sanatorium or a long prison sentence.
Also, I’m a bit on the flabby side from consecutive seasons of comfort eating and there’s nothing so repulsive to the eye as pale wobbly bits on display in the unforgiving sunshine.
Anyway, I was basking on the kitchen doorstep with a coffee and the papers and just biting into my second chocolate digestive when I happened on a headline reading, “Two biscuits a day keeps good health away for women.” I flung it from me, (the paper, not the biscuit – which I finished.) Taking up the paper again I read, “Women are eating two biscuits too much each day. Obesity will overtake smoking as the leading cause of cancer by 2043.” Well, there’s nothing like spreading alarm and despondency among the female population.
Could it be our addiction to biscuits is due to long and effective conditioning by advertising that ‘a drink is too wet without one’, or our inherently hospitable nature that feels unless we offer a little something to nibble on with a drop of tea, we’ll be perceived as mean – or worse, a bad household manager? Which is why I always have a shop-bought cake in the freezer and at least three packets of biscuits in the cupboard; bog-standard for family and fancy dear ones for visitors – the upshot being I eat most of them myself.
Apropos of nothing, years ago my grown-up sister and my fifteen-year-old self paid a very brief visit to rather posh English people who offered us tea. In came a tray laden with dainty bone china and matching teapot (leaf tea and a little strainer.) With some ceremony our hostess dispensed her bounty and we sat with fragile cups and saucers balanced precariously on our laps for a long time until it dawned on me there was nothing else forthcoming. But I digress…
By uncanny coincidence the following morning’s paper carried the reassuring headline “A bar of dark chocolate can lighten mood.” I put down my third Garibaldi biscuit, (they’re rather small) to give the article my full attention. It began promisingly. Quote: “Chocolate contains psychoactive ingredients which produce a feeling of euphoria similar to cannabis.” Hmm… cheaper too. And legal. Who knew? The feature was full of reassuring statistics like “of the 13,626 adults studied, 25 per cent who ate the most chocolate were less likely to report depressive symptoms than those who didn’t eat it.” Of course there was a caveat. Quote: “More research is needed to establish whether the link between good mood and chocolate eating could be because depressed people can lose their appetite.”
Personally speaking, I’ve never been depressed enough to refuse chocolate.
Chocolate fans fall into two camps – milk and dark. Milk chocolate has a tongue-coating, cloying quality like eating a mouthful of velvet. The dark has a faintly bitter edge that melts into a rich roundness far more satisfying. White chocolate is for Milky Bar Kids. Take it from me, a bar of Fry’s Chocolate Cream with its nearly black glossy coat that breaks with a satisfying ‘pock’ to reveal a silken fondant centre, can mend broken hearts.
As for the gloomy prospect of the life-threatening consequences of consuming too many biscuits referred to earlier, I think I may have come up with, if not a healthier option, at least a modest solution. One could, if nobody’s looking, lick the mood-enhancing chocolate off the top, throw away the biscuit and be halfway happy. It’s probably because I eat so much chocolate that I’m so cheerfully positive in the face of all life’s vicissitudes.
Who knows the secret of the Black Magic box? I do……
