You do know what day it is today, don't you? You must have had it written in your diary for ages. You must have been longing for this day for quite a while and let's face it you deserve to enjoy this day for all its worth. There must have come a point when you thought it would never arrive but everything comes to those who wait. So you popped into your local newsagent or sweet shop, scrutinised the vast selection and variety of chocolate bars and you just couldn't resist the temptation. Go on treat yourself. You've been eating chocolate for as long as anybody can remember and now seems as good a time as ever.
Today Ladies and Gentlemen is National Chocolate Day and what better incentive is there to spend at least half an hour salivating at both dark and milk chocolate, those timeless classics that have sat invitingly on supermarket shelves, local corner shops and those big, sweet emporiums where whole acres of row upon row of chocolates look ever so appealing and mouth-watering. It is one of those irresistible indulgences and delightful treats we all need when times are stressful, the workload has been both punishing and overwhelming and you just need to wind down during the day.
Ever since those early days, when those cocoa bean plantations first provided us with the first tantalising glimpse of chocolate, most of us would make no secret of the fact that all of us need such guilty pleasures. There's Mars, Milky Way, Snickers, those glorious boxes of Celebrations and at the end of the most expensive market, Thorntons. There were the countless bars of Dairy Milk, Hershey's in the USA and my personal favourite Bourneville, the chocolate bar that simply melts deliciously in your mouth. It is the most common and recurring theme during our lives because we all need that ultimate taste sensation.
So, let's hear it for the humble chocolate bar, a symbolic reminder of our childhood, the perfect reward for the young child who had done so exceptionally well in his or her multiplication tables in maths, earned five stars for knowing the capitals of the world in geography and then painted a magnificent landscape in art. You must remember it, surely. Head down in your exercise book in your school classroom, sweating industriously at English comprehension and essay writing, agonising over science and then working off school dinners with a thorough work out in PE.
You cast your minds back to your formative days in primary school when the end of your day was punctuated beautifully by that first taste of chocolate. It almost felt like an introduction to something that would resonate in your life indefinitely. We were surrounded by sweet shops when we were young and they were always within easy access to your route back to your parents home after school. We crossed those big roads in Ilford, Essex, tenderly holding the hand of our mother and then nagged mum into submission. It almost felt like an early rite of passage at such a young stage of your life.
At the time of course most children must have thought it was somehow compulsory, a vital necessity since the day itself had been a hard, gruelling slog and besides we just needed to relax with something sweet and truly lovely. In fact it is hard to imagine how any child could have survived their first years of toil and drudgery staring at endless blackboards and then wincing when the chalks scraped across the board with almost infuriating regularity although we did make allowances for it eventually. We knew of course that the sweet shop would become our regular haunt.
Chocolate more or less defined who we were as kids. We greeted with delight that first birthday cake, layer upon layer of chocolate cream smothered with yet more lashings of chocolate oozing from the cake. Little did we know it at the time but chocolate became an important moment of our lives, a seminal day filled with love, family and friends, a time to gather at parties, weddings, barmitzvahs, cinemas and restaurants where slabs of chocolate would dominate desserts. We'd nibble away moreishly away at bags of chocolate eclairs while feasting our eyes on the latest Bond movie.
Years later of course we would be reminded of the health dangers and drawbacks of eating too much chocolate. Our parents, always doting, would tell us repeatedly that chocolate would rot our teeth, increase the likelihood of obesity in later life and make us sick if eaten to excess. A Mars a day made you work, rest and play but subconsciously it also represented something that would have a far more damaging effect on our waistline. We didn't know it at the time but chocolate was really bad for you and we should really stop eating it because if we didn't we'd put on substantial stones of weight, looking podgy and rotund.
But chocolate has to be associated with any of our religious festivals be it Sukkot and Simchat Torah in the Jewish religion, Ramadan for the Asian community and, above all, Easter eggs and Christmas. We'd like to think that chocolate will always be around for us because it just has and always will be. It is a consolation and comfort when times are rough and a hot chocolate drink from the drinks machine.
British commercial TV channels have become synonymous with everything we may have watched as kids. There was Black Magic, the box of chocolates so seductively packaged that men would go to all lengths to seek the approval of their girlfriend or wife. Dairy Milk Tray and, After Eights in mint flavour were always available on my wonderful grand-parents 1970s hostess trolley and it was also very much a shared, collective memory that all of us could think back on with unalloyed affection.
And yet Bourneville were also immensely popular chocolates in my grandparents cupboards, mountains of dark chocolate that just stimulated the senses and made you almost a connoisseur of chocolate's finer textures. So today is National Chocolate Day, a celebration of exquisite choc flavours, your tasted buds enjoying instant gratification and satisfying your appetite immediately at the end of a meal. Oh, we can never tire of chocolate. Let the chocolate fest begin.
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