Morning:
6°c
Chocolate is the great psychological divide in adulthood. A colleague boasts that he hasn't bought it for 25 years trashy, meretricious stuff, packed with sugar. Another male friend chides my babyish, bar-a-day habit. But trust me, chocolate is the reward you give yourself when life is going badly. It's the perfect way to cancel out a bad date, calm down a hangover, grab supper on the run after the theatre.
Chocolate has more flavour and complexity than any other food. It's the only food substance that melts at body temperature. There's the Proustian interplay with memory, perception, fantasy.
No wonder Kraft's £12 billion takeover of Cadbury is causing such angst. Not only do 30,000 jobs hang in the balance but another great British institution has fallen.
Growing up as a West Midlands teenager, I loved the fact that they painted Bournville station dark purple in honour of Cadbury, a Victorian Quaker who pioneered an ethical business approach.
But then more emotion is invested in chocolate than any other foodstuff. As Tim Richardson, author of Sweets: A History of Temptation, points out, confectionery is the first thing you are able to buy, own, give, trade and consume of your own volition. It makes you friends and takes you out of yourself.
It's a class issue, of course. I grew up on Milky Ways and Curly Wurlys. Fine chocolate Thornton's was for very special occasions. And I've always been suspicious of nouveau riche upstart Ferrero Rocher. The ambassador's favourite, indeed: it's just nasty bits of hazelnut in gold foil.
But these days hand-made chocolate is everywhere. London has a new wave of high priests such as Paul A Young and William Curley, who cook up extraordinary flavours chocolate with chilli, pineapple confit with ylang-ylang in their laboratories. A new generation of connoisseurs is prepared to pay a bit more for this. It's like wine in the Eighties. Now stocked by Harrods and Fortnum's, independent confectioners Hope and Greenwood prove you can update Fifties chic for a modern, multicultural audience.
Chocolate can be deeply sexy. God knows what damage the Flake girl did to my teen feminist sensibilities but I was ravished recently by chocolate boudoir Cocomaya (run by Serena Rees, ex-Agent Provocateur), with its Damien Hirst-style skulls and butterflies.
I'm told the mantra is: eat less, eat better. Afterwards your palate should feel clean, not fatty. You don't bolt a jasmine tea truffle. You savour it.
Personally, I'm a Cadbury's Dairy Milk kind of girl straightforward, nothing flashy. I'm more likely to haunt late-night supermarkets in search of my fix. Which is why I mourn the Cadbury's takeover.
I love the idea that the great confectioners Joseph Cadbury, Milton Hershey, Papa Suchard, Jean Tobler were social progressives, with a paternalistic but humane management style. Mega-conglomerate Kraft Foods has no such history. What we put in our mouths, what we ingest, keeps us alive. It may be fanciful but I like to think that chocolatiers the great agents of pleasure understand that something so primal needs to be produced by workers who are happy and well paid, with decent holidays. Otherwise that Creme Egg might just make me choke.
