Not Even
the Good Kind

You can watch it happen. Something crosses the face. A small, kind, entirely unshakeable conviction that every chocolate I have ever eaten was an administrative error, and that they happen to be holding the correction.

Ah, they say. But have you had good chocolate.

I have. I have had the good kind. I have had the kind that arrives in a box with a ribbon and a small card explaining the provenance of the bean, as though I were being introduced to it at a dinner party and ought to ask after its family.

Not dark. Not milk. Not white. Not cocoa.
Not hot chocolate, not chocolate cake, and not the little decorative curl a chef places on top when presentation is being asked to do work that flavour could not.

Not the ones with liqueur inside, either, which people offer with a particular confidence, as though the difficulty had been sobriety.

The file is closed. It has been closed for some time. There is nothing further to submit.

Somebody once told me it was an aphrodisiac

I want to be careful here, because I have five children, so clearly something has worked.

I simply do not believe it was the Toblerone.

And yet I watch

I have spent my entire life watching other people eat chocolate, and I want to report, as an outsider, that it is extraordinary.

The eyes go first. Somebody spots it across a room and there is a real change in the face, a small lifting, the way a dog hears a car door. Then the unwrapping, which is never hurried. Then the first piece goes in and the eyes close.

And there is a sound. It is not a word. It lives somewhere between a sigh and a hum, it is entirely involuntary, and for the length of it the person is no longer with you. They have gone somewhere, and you have not been invited.

I find it genuinely moving,
and I am, I admit, a little envious.

Not of the chocolate. I have that feeling. Mine turns up a few times a year in the form of Kawartha Dairy Bordeaux Cherry mixed with Baskin-Robbins Rum Raisin, and if a glass of Prosecco is involved I will agree to very nearly anything.

So I know the sound. I have made the sound. I simply cannot get there by this particular road, and the rest of the world appears to be on it.

Nor is it improving with age. It used to be the taste. It is now the smell, which is a considerable escalation, because a taste can be declined politely and a smell simply arrives.

Four out of five

I have five children. Four of them love chocolate with the uncomplicated devotion of people who have never once had to explain themselves at a dinner party.

The fifth does not.

I have thought about this considerably more than is reasonable and concluded that it is probably hereditary, which comes as a relief, because it means I have passed on something other than a talent for noticing problems nobody asked me to notice.

My children are grown, and I could not tell you the favourite chocolate of a single one of them.

Not one.

I know their handwriting. I know which of them cries at films and which of them pretends not to. I can identify any of them from the sound of them coming up the stairs.

I have no idea which one likes the caramel.

In my defence, the costume was magnificent

The closest I have ever come was a Halloween some years ago, when I went out dressed as a red M and M.

Full costume. The enormous M on the front and, because I do not do things by halves, the enormous M on the back as well.

And my line, delivered all evening to anybody who would hold still long enough to receive it, was that I melt in your mouth and not in your hands.

Nobody laughed harder than I did.

That is as near as I have ever come to enjoying chocolate, and I should like it noted that I was very good at it.

The file remains closed.