Hope after all

I guess you’d say, judging by my current girth (heavier than I should be, lets leave it at that eh), that I have a healthy relationship with the humble chocolate biscuit. Couple that with the fact that I have ended up spending most of my working time sat on my backside tied to an edit suite, and you end up with something of a vicious circle. It was on a recent edit, that the client I was working with, suddenly started humming the tune to the old Club ads, you know *effects high voice* “If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club.”

That naturally led to the discussion about the biscuits, and the related adverts that we remembered from our childhoods, and also the various techniques used to consume them. For example: I used to always nibble a Trio round the edge, then separate the chocolate and biscuit base from the caramel segments, and finally the chocolate from the top of the said caramel segments leaving the best bit till last! And of course, as well as the adverts that where burnt into our adolescent minds so that we badgered our parents to buy the products in question, was the analysis of how, the biscuits that had survived the passage of time and the cut throat commercial world, are in fact not quite the same as they used to be. See the Penguins are not quite right (packaging design mainly), and Wagon Wheels are smaller than they used to be etc etc.

It’s funny how certain things like biscuits, music and other assorted randomness trap memories. As off that back of that conversation I got thinking about my childhood growing up in a little semi detached council house in Devon, sneaking into the pantry and try to work out how many Yo Yos, Goldbars, Breakaways I could get away with swiping without Mum twigging and much wrath flowing my way. It was ever a fine moment in life when you found a stash hidden by her in an attempt to make them last longer than a couple days after unpacking from the supermarket.

So, somehow not much has changed in the intervening years despite being 36 years of age now, married. and father of three, by rights I should know better – no? But some how the chocolate biscuit still has much power over me as it ever did. Whether home alone (you can never just have one can you?), or at while work (oh the curse of the edit suite treat!) I find them extremely difficult to resist. Only the other day while at home unsupervised and failing yet again to get any paper work done, I made a chance discovery while trying to locate some herbal tea, an unopened box of M&S organic dark chocolate ginger & pear biscuit; Hmmmmmm! Then the penny dropped, there were a present for my wife’s recent birthday and more than my life was worth, and somehow I resisted. Maybe there’s hope after all.

by Simon Edwards

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