I knew yer one behind the counter would ask if I wanted anything else in that automated, corporate tone, so I beat her to the punch and said “can I have an almond croissant and nothing else please!?”

And she said “Sure, would you like anything else?”… I should have asked her again for the almond croissant but she would have asked me if I wanted anything else and we would have gone round and round and round in circles and I might never have come out of there again…

Maybe that’s where all the missing people go; ‘Can I have an almond croissant please and nothing else?’ ‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’, ‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’,‘Sure, would you like anything else?’ ‘Just the almond croissant please and nothing else’….

Edible letters too…

I proceeded to purchase it for a whopping…

When I got into the bus, I felt the urge.  I took it out of my bag and had a little look at what all the fuss was about.

Nice packaging.

Nice logo.

Nice little note underneath the seal, telling me to ‘tuck in’…

Two slabs of chocolate wrapped in gold…

I put it back in my bag.

It was far too fancy to eat on the bus.

Eating a bar of this caliber required a bit of fuss.  I needed a cup of tea and a comfortable seat.  I needed to put my feet up.  I needed a few cushions.  I needed a punkah wallah.  I needed…  well, i just needed to get off the smelly bus so I could really savour these glorious looking chocolate slabs of delight that lay seductively before me…

When I got home and made myself comfortable, I tucked in to what is now, most definitely my favourite chocolate on the planet. 

The texture is like, sort of harder than fudge but the same kind of soft quality to it, your teeth sink into it.  It’s not like all those plasticky type dark chocolates on the market that make that cheap ’snap’ noise when you crack a piece off…

The taste is so rich and tangy.  It boasts of subtle tropical fruit tones, and it delivers them with every bite.  The after taste has a zing too and you just have to wait before taking the next bite because the experience continues on in your mouth after…

It was so good, I had to buy two more today!

For those of you who don’t know what it is and find yourself in a rare situation where you have the opportunity to eat it, you better read this first or you’ll be at risk of choking to death. 

It is a kind of a light traditional Irish Fruitcake that used to make an appearance around Hallowe’en when I was a young wan. 

Haven’t seen it around since…

Anyway, it’s a nice tasting cake, nice and light, I normally don’t like fruity loafs but I really like Barmbrack.  It’s even nicer with a thick layer of butter on top and a cuppa cha on the side. 

Once you bite into it and start enjoying it, you’ll soon be picking at the contents in your mouth, the reason being that you will find all sorts of random objects in the cake.  Rings and sticks and hard peas and pieces of clothes…

Each object has a meaning and foretells your future…

If you find the pea in your slice - you’ll never get married…
The stick – you’d be beaten by your husband or if you were a man, you’d beat the wife.  This was an ever so subtle way of saying you were going to have an unhappy married life.
The piece of cloth – you’d be skint
The coin – you’d be rich.
The ring meant you would get married that year.

I remember one time, I was eating it and unknownst to myself, the stick was in the particular bit of cake I was chewing.  Whatever way I chewed it anyway, it made the stick go vertical and it slotted into one of the nukes and crannies in my bottom back tooth.  When the top teeth came down from above in the midst of the chewing, it shafted the stick further into my tooth and I’ll never forget the pain it caused me.  I had to yank the stick out from my tooth which caused it to bleed and it kind of put spinters into my gum.  I couldn’t chew on that side of my mouth for about a month after…

You’d never get away with having such a cake on the market these days…

Bring back the Barmbrack!

I couldn’t wait to get home and tear the covers off em and ram em down my throat.

I restrained myself though, as these are sophisticated creatures of delight.  I knew I had to play it cool with these…

I really had a bit of a pain in my head trying to decide which one to eat first.  I pondered over them and fondled each of them one by one.  I read their wrappers and took in what they had to say about how they were made, what they were made of and where in the world their innermost beans came from.

I decided by eliminating one from the list.  I decided to leave the Mora Mora Bar ’til last, for two reasons;

1. It was the most expensive – It cost a whopping £3.21
2. It says this on the wrapper:

“Worlds best Chocolate Winner – Silver Award 2007″.

I thought it must be pretty good tasting stuff and best kept for last.  I placed it carefully back in the fridge.

So it was a toss up between the other two.

Seeds of Change just seemed to beckon me with it’s pieces of figs, so I went for it.

My God.

My God is all I say.

This is one flippin’ mouthwatering piece of chocolate.

Look at the bits of fig in it:

The whole thing was just perfect.  The texture was divine and I didn’t want the consumption of it to end.  I wanted more when I had finished, so I moved onto my second conquest.

The Chokolit Dark Orange – Biting Back Bar with the pic of the cute chimp on it.  He kinda looks sad…  hmmmm… anyway… 

This chocolate was just beautiful. 

It had the perfect consistency.  I’m no professional taster; I can’t go on about the fruit tones and the flowery essence and all that waffle.  I’m just a simpleton who knows what I like in a bar of chocolate.  I know I like this one.  The texture is perfect.  It’s got a hint of orange, you’d be a pure eejit to miss that cuz it says it on the wrapper too.  It was just another magical experience.

The Mora Mora Bar was consumed on the next evening.

It was a momentous build up…

What an anti-climax.

This was really disappointing.

A glorified Bourneville.

It was hard and plastic-y tasting like Bourneville too.

I wouldn’t recommend it at all.

What a rip off too…

5 miles.

Was hungry after it.

Ate this:

The egg was a bit over-done. 

Over the years I have come to be a bit funny with my eggs.  They have to be free range and they have to come from happy hens.  I used to like them sunny side up but now I have them ‘over easy’.  I used to like to see the yolk gush out when you slice through it with a knife, but now i don’t.  I like it very soft and gooey in the middle but it mustn’t spill out all over the plate.  The yolk mustn’t run past the circumference of the white part of the egg.   It mustn’t have that kind of film of see-through goo over the yolk either.  That turns me off.   

As a result of my fussiness, I never have fried eggs in a restaurant.  If I did, I would have to go in and cook it myself and chefs don’t really like people doing that kind of thing.

It was a winning brekkie all the same.

They’re the ‘half measure’ trolley’s.  Well those are the ones that our shopping trolley fits under.  It stores it out of the way so you don’ t have to be carrying it around while you are shopping.  Not many people know of this.  People watched me store it under there too and you could see that they were well impressed with my finding such a storage space for it.

I went over to the stack of trolley’s anyway, I had a pound coin in my hand. 

There was a man putting his back and he was kinda loitering there for longer than it takes. 

He turned to me in a gentlemanly manner and said something along the lines of “Here you go…  here is a trolley for you”  I was feeling a bit dozy and said ”Oh right, so how does this work, I give you the pound and you give me the trolley” and he said “you can give it to me for 50 pence if you like as it’s second hand” I laughed then and he smiled at me, I felt a connection with the man, as he too was Irish. 

I looked at him as he walked away across the zebra crossing and out of my life.  

I just kind of studied him for a split second, the way you do when you have an interaction with someone for the first time, you kinda take them in, don’t ya?  You kinda make a judgement about them based on the way the hold themselves in their skin, their clothes, their walk and their shoes…  you can tell a whole lot by someone’s choice of shoes. 

I snapped out of that anyway and got on with my grocery shopping.  I bought this lot with my money:

What you don’t see clearly in the above picture is my little chocolate collection for the week:

I have turned into a terrible chocolate snob altogether.  I spent £9.00 on the chocolate bars in the photograph above.  I never tasted any of them before and wanted to try them out.

I finished my shopping anyway and paid for what i bought.

When i tried to return the trolley to the stack I discovered that the pound coin was jammed in there and it wouldn’t let me take it out.  I swear to God, i was cursing that man.  What a sneak…

When I looked back in hindsight, I remembered that he was attempting to take his coin out of the slot before i came along.  Way down deep inside the bowels of my psyche, there was a part of me that twigged it too, but I never kind of allowed that feeling to surface.  I guess it was an instinct. 

He had a sneaky way about him too and he palmed it off on me, that gammy trolley.  He ripped me off… So out of principal, I decided to queue up at Customer Services to get my pound back.  I was waiting in line for about twenty minutes.  For all of those twenty minutes I was seething.  I was thinking evil thoughts about that man and was also thinking how strange it was that i walked into that situation all knowing.  There was a part of me that knew exactly what was happening… and that intrigued me. 

There was a Greek lady with a moustache in the queue in front of me. 

She turned around and we had a brief two way conversation about city life and she said she has been living next door to the same neighbours for twenty five years and she doesn’t know them and in Greece it isn’t like that.  The conversation then went into a one-way conversation and I just kept saying “yeah… yeah…. yeah….” but couldn’t tell you what she was saying, she was kinda hard to understand anyway. 

I wasn’t in the mood for chit chat.  I just wanted my pound back…

Well I don’t know if that’s true but I thought of that analogy when I experienced an overwhelming, almerciful craving after my run tonight and I just can’t shake it off…

My craving was for a slice of this:

A Slice of Lemon Meringue Pie

I still can’t get it out of my mind.  My mouth is watering at the thought of it.  I haven’t had a slice of it in years…

I remember where and when I had my last slice of it though, it was here:

Good ol’ Patsy’s Corner in the heart of Kinsale Town…  and the Lemon Meringue Pie was made with Patsy’s own hands.

I would kill for one of Patsy’s Lemon Meringue Pies now…

She makes the best Lemon Meringue Pie without a doubt…

If anyone knows where you can get good Lemon Meringue Pie in London, please drop me a line…

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