m&m

I don’t buy sweets often, I don’t have a sweet tooth. The reason for this is probably based in the fact that I disliked my mother’s cooking, seriously disliked it. So the normal line of “If you don’t eat everything up you won’t get any pudding” was more of a threat than a promise of something to come. The normal choice was not to eat up and so avoid the pudding. The upside to this means that I don’t eat puddings and don’t eat sweets. Except I do.

Every now and then I get this mad desire, this huge craving for sugar. Whereas, normally I can walk down the aisle ignoring everything, there occurs this rare occasion when I find myself stood at the checkout with a packet of marshmallows, one of m&ms and a two litre bottle of cherry coke. A quick drive home, unpack the rest of the shopping, grab a glass and head to the sofa with my carrier bag full of illicit goodies.

Pouring a glass of cherry coke I grab the first bag, it is the bag of m&ms. Tearing into the bag I tend to grab a handfull and whack them into my mouth. This quickly fills the need for sugar and chocolate. A quick rinse of the mouth with coke before opening the marshmallows. Eating the marshmallows becomes a game. The first time I put one in my mouth, the second two, the third time three and so on. Fortunately the game tends to end by the seventh turn. While this has been happening I have been rapidly searching through eight hundred channels on the satellite, spending 2 to 3 seconds on each channel, commenting out loud (even with a mouth full of marshmallows) about the quality of each station’s output.

Eventually, with the marshmallows finished and a programme found to watch, I return to the m&ms. By now the craving has eased, the real desperate edge of the craving, now I can take my time and enjoy each individual m&m. One at a time. The first few I pop into my mouth and crunch but eventually I tire of this. So I move onto giving each individual m&m the time and effort they deserve.

I close my eyes, put my hand in the bag, choose one at random and place it on my tongue. It is important that it goes on my tongue and I take care to protect it from my teeth. Rolling around on my tongue I try to guess what colour it is. This has to be timed just right because if you wait too long when you pick it out of your mouth all the colour might have gone and you are just left with the white sugar shell. I have to take extra care at this point as well because the sugar shell is very fragile, too much pressure with my fingers or an accidental knock on a tooth and it cracks. Once I’ve checked the colour I replace the m&m quickly, time is also important because I don’t want the m&m to cool. Back onto my tongue I keep rolling it around, keeping it moving. The art is to get all the chocolate to melt inside the shell, so that when the sugar shell finally does disintegrate, liquid chocolate coats my tongue. Personally, at this moment, I could spit the peanut out.

I repeat this for about another ten or eleven m&ms, by which time my urge is satisfied, my cravings fulfilled. The bag then sits on the table unfinished, waiting for the next time the urge comes upon me. Except by the time it does, the bag is empty.

I don’t live alone!