Choco Leibnitz

This morning Dave and I realised that our hotel in Hannover seems to be situated right next to the factory that makes Choco-Leibnitz biscuits. Or maybe it's the corporate offices. It's definitely something to do with the Choco-Leibnitz empire. I took us a while to figure this out, which is a little embarrassing as there are signs saying "Leibnitz" everywhere. I suppose I just figured that in Germany "Leibnitz" is a real word that means something like "One way" or "Exit" or "Sausage" or something. Of course if I were so motivated, I could look this up online and see exactly what it means, but I paid for 24 hours of wifi yesterday and used it all up reading about wrestling, so let it go.

I don't know anyone who knows what Choco-Leibnitz is and doesn't like them. In fact, only the other day I saw Jigalov (a Russian clown who scares me deeply) arrive in Hannover and before he had even checked into his hotel, he ran to the supermarket around the corner and returned with a big box of the aforementioned biscuits which he clutched to his chest like a newborn child.

I once won a box of them from a competition on the Choco-Leibnitz website. I answered some easy questions and gave them my address and then, a few weeks later (by which time I had forgotten all about it) a box of my favourite biscuits arrived in the mail. Free biscuits before breakfast! With the exception of my wedding, my mum surviving a road accident, and meeting Monkey, this might well have been one of the highlights of my life.

I have a method for eating them. I eat all the chocolate carefully from around the edges, then use my teeth to prize or scrape the remaining chocolate from the top surface, finally eating the plain biscuit as an afterthought. This is how everyone should eat them, obviously. Most things that are possible to eat this way, I eat this way. If a snack is dipped or covered in something, then I eat that first, then the main body of the snack. If it comprised two or more separate sections, I must eat the sections individually, one at a time. The best thing to do this with is a "fab" ice lolly because you first carefully bite off all the chocolate covered in hundreds and thousands (all in one go for maximum luck), then the white milky stuff that goes half way down (careful not to break the ice lolly part), then then rest. I've always done this. At the age of 38 I'm still not sure if everyone else does this too, or if it's just me. But if I don't do it, I feel that I have done something wrong. I guess if I am to have obsessive compulsive disorder, it's probably good that it's pretty much restricted to snack food products. And the lines in the pavement made by the edges of paving stones on the journey from the tube station to my house (The longer I can walk on an unbroken line, the more successful I'll be), but we all do that, right?