Childhood chocolate

Funerals are time of reflection, respect, sadness and celebration of a hopefully full life.
This blog is concentrating on the reflection element, those places your mind takes you to when you are thinking about the times you’ve spent with the recently departed.
I’d known “Auntie” Ifigenia or Fiona all my life, the latter name chosen to make it simpler for non-Greeks to pronounce. She was part of the Cypriot generation who came to North London to work in the 1950s and 60s.
Every Saturday, she’d do her weekly shop and then pop into our house for our coffee. As a small kid I really looked forward to her visits. This was the one day of the week I could eat chocolate. It was a kit-kat, a two finger kit-kat. Without fail, she’d bring it to me, I’d politely say thankyou and then go and hide in some corner, where I would savour every bite, I remembered the feeling of emptiness and disappointment the times she couldn’t make it.
It’s strange to think that everything is a commodity now, so accessible. Yet chocolate was a luxury, is a luxury. For working class families in the seventies it wasn’t something that was easily accessible or necessarily affordable. I used to think things like “When I grow up… I’ll eat crisps and chocolate every day” it seemed decadent and regal to me, a real step up from where I was. (as well as wanting to be an astronaut – a chocolate/crisps eating one clearly).
It’s only a small, funny little memory. But it seemed important to capture it. A way of saying thank you to a lovely lady.

Poetry

Yeah what? Poetry. I’ve just entered a competition to win 50 quids worth of Rococo chocolate. The store in Marylebone High Street is round the corner from our London offices and although (very) expensive, they make lovely gifts and taste amazing.
http://rococochocolates.com/
The competition is on facebook, here ….
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=166937213322687&id=43480946480
I decided to go for a theme of deviancy and colloquial filth, totally different to all the earnest / evocative and playfully humorous entries. I don’t think I’ll win, but I’m in with a fighting chance, like when Lordi won Eurovision.
So here it is… the theme was to mention at least one of their chocolate bars, which I forcefully wedged in, like a hedgehog through a letterbox.
I like chocolate,
quite a lot a lot,
Orange and Geranium,
Blows my cranium,
Chocolate from Grenada,
Wow! flippin’ Ada!
I quite like to eat ‘em,
Off a nice bottom,
But not off my own you see,
As that would involve great agility,
But rather, off a burlesque dancer,
Or if you are so inclined, you can feast from the behind,
of a Bengal lancer.

And here is a more serious one, about my lost summer to injury. Only just starting to run again. Seeing the surgeon on Tuesday, so want to be able to play football again and kick my mates. It’s been 6 months.
Summers lost,
The dull dawn,
mist broken by showers,
A gasp, feel the season,
Suck in the chill of Autumn,
the taste of damp topsoil,
The bark of pheasants,
In the woods,
I can run again.