my dark master

i am not immune to the wonders of the dark bean. chocolate (aka the dark master) has been a friend/necessity in my life for as long as i can remember. as a very little boy, my mum's mum kept a little cardboard box of small cadbury dairy milk chocolate bars handy when my bruvver and i visited. these little bars - no bigger than half your pinky finger - were nibbled on and melted in my mouth such that they lasted much much longer than their makers would believe or could even imagine.
through time i graduated to the magic of chocolate buttons. their soft round edges danced many a happy dance on my tongue! half the fun was coaxing them to melt slowly without resorting to quickly chewing and swallowing. the other half was deciding when you needed a drink to wash the chocolate clagginess (a word i learned from a walking buddy long ago who hailed from driffield up in yorkshire, england) out of your throat.
one of the more interesting iterations of the chocolate experience for me was the flake bar. probably the most challenging of all the bars because if you bite into it, pieces go everywhere and you see portions of your chocolate experience performing all sorts of gymnastic routines through the air and landing more often than not in hard to reach (or undesirable) spots, thereby denying you your full pleasure!

if you suck the flake bar it becomes a strange and even more disconnected mess and definitely not something you want to spend a lot of time looking at. one of my more successful strategies was to carefully unwrap the package and lay it as flat as possible and using thumb and index finger (one more small detail that makes me glad to be human), i would carefully deconstruct the flakes and just as carefully raise them to my mouth wherein they would be allowed to melt as slowly as they wanted. that way it was possible to keep better track of the whereabouts of those pieces trying to make a break for it.
i have graduated now to fair trade organic chocolate that costs a fortune but is hugely worth it as it carries the true essence of chocolate in its incredible melt-in-my-mouth goodness and leaves me astonished and chemically jacked each and every time i have a little square! i buy my chocolate through birds and beans and have it sent through the mail to my home on an irregular but pretty much predictable basis - when the going gets tough, the chocolate gets going!

as a closing to this piece, i should share that my daughter, who is now twelve eats one little bag of hershey kisses each week. contrary to what all the medical profession suggest, she has not become obese or whatever - she probably only weighs about sixty pounds - but she cannot deny the power of her dark master. weeks where i fail to come home with her bag of little chocolate happy experiences are filled with recrimination and angst. "how could you forget?" she'll ask in as pathetic and plaintive a voice as any father has ever heard. let me tell you - those of you who are female and reading this - you really have no idea how hard it is for father's to fail their daughters!!!

so how's your relationship with the dark bean?