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The Action Aid people had given me a bag of Divine chocolate as a thank you for doing their marathon gig on Tuesday. Tonight, we cracked open a bar after dinner as a little treat. It looked like an interesting taste choice, Caramel and Espresso Nibs. I really like caramel and I like coffee, though the nibs bit made it sound like it might contain the remnants left after you’d made an espresso in a coffee machine after. Surely that would be insane. But that’s pretty much what it tasted like. The chocolate was nice enough and the caramel probably was too (I couldn’t really taste it though), but the whole bar seemed to be infused with tough coffee grounds, that crunched as you ate them, like you were eating chocolate that had been made in an uncleaned concrete mixer. I love chocolate way too much, but even I found this quite difficult to eat. But partly in disbelief and partly because I didn’t want to miss out on my special treat pudding, I ate my half of the bar. I hoped I would get used to it or realise I was being a philistine for not enjoying this rare treat. But I never got to that stage. Because it was a chocolate bar with crunchy bits of coffee in it.
I appreciate the artistic effort of this, combining the loveliest things in the world with something awful to make us consider the juxtaposition of pleasure and pain or to realise that however good life could be some arsehole has to ruin it by chucking a load of used coffee into the chocolate machine (it’s a metaphor, except in this one case, where it is also literal). Maybe the Divine artist was trying to make us consider what it was like to eat a drink, flipping experience on its head and making us realise that that would be horrible, so we should leave things as they are. I hope Divine will bring out a chocolate bar combining fudge with the contents of a vacuum cleaner or hazelnuts with discarded bits of human tissue from the bins at the back of the hospital.
My wife threw away her largely uneaten half, which was lucky as I might well have eaten it, because it still looked like a lovely chocolate bar and I couldn’t get it into my head that it might be a caffeine laden booby trap. But now I think about it, eating it out of the bin where it would be covered in vegetable peelings and cat hair, bin juice and crap off the floor could only enhance the artistic experience.
I found it difficult to sleep tonight. Partly because I had just eaten a whole load of chocolate coated coffee, but also because some fucking idiots were out having a noisy party somewhere. At around midnight a group of drunk men started singing a loud and raucous song which might have been about football. It was hard to tell as the words were all slurred, but I think I heard the repeated refrain of “Fuck Arsenalâ€. So maybe it was a group of men who really hated football and wanted people to know this at bedtime, working their way through a team at a time in alphabetical order. It went on for ages.
I hated this kind of thing before I had a baby, but as Phoebe is not sleeping brilliantly at the moment, this added an extra level of jeopardy to the anti-social behaviour of these pricks, who knew that no one would dare complain about what they were doing for fear of being beaten to a pulp. In all likelihood their hope was that someone could complain, thus giving them a valid reason to be affronted by their freedom of drunkenly shouting being curtailed. As it happens Phoebe slept through it (and if we could all do that, the idiots in life would have no reason to exist and would disappear where they came from back up their own arseholes), but it meant I didn’t sleep. And then when I finally dropped off Phoebe did wake up (presumably due to the unearthly silence that had descended over Shepherd’s Bush). At least she has an excuse for making a noise in the middle of the night, because she’s a baby. And maybe I should cut the baby men some slack too. They have every right to shout aggressively in the middle of the night, just as they have the right to object to me mildly mocking the existence of International Men’s Day and have the right to run around killing people because they think a magic man in the sky wants them to kill some of the people he created (even though you’d think he could manage that for himself if he was really all that bothered).
These guys really are the espresso nibs in the chocolate and caramel that life could have been without them.
