some very scary news – first published 4 December 2012

Mostly I don’t read the news. In my opinion half of it is scaremongering and the other half over exaggerated. All of it is depressing and there’s enough depression in the world without inviting it into your home. Generally I don’t watch the news on TV either, although I do eat my breakfast to GMTV or whatever they’re calling it these days. This is mostly because I like to know what the weather is likely to be doing before I have to go out in it and they have a handy little clock on the screen. Besides, the show is usually light and fluffy and I’m not really paying attention anyway. On 4 December 2012 though, there was a horrifying news item that almost made me choke on my granola.

4 December 2012

This morning on GMTV I heard some extremely disturbing news. It was cunningly sandwiched between good news items about Prince Willaim’s announcement of imminent fatherhood and a pointless interview with Olivia Newton John asking her what she thought about a new royal baby. This was something so terrible I was worried it would give me nightmares. I’m hoping it’s just a scare story but I did a quick Google search and found it on more than one website so I’m very concerned it might not be. They’re saying that an increasingly dangerous situation on the Ivory Coast due to political unrest is causing cocoa farmers to leave the country in droves. This is where the majority of the world’s chocolate is produced and it’s predicted, if this carries on, there will be a worldwide shortage of chocolate by 2014. That’s only a year away folks!

All this is particularly upsetting when recent research has shown pure dark chocolate to be higher in antioxidants than super fruits like blueberries and pomegranate. Just when I had an excuse. My first thought was to panic buy and stock up but that’ll never work, if I had a house full of chocolate there is no way I’d be able to resist eating it. I think we need to urgently send someone to Africa to sort this out, forget the oil and petrol situation, this is chocolate we’re talking about! If things start going wrong in Brazil and Colombia too we’re in deep trouble because we’ll have coffee shortages as well. Can you grow cocoa in Southampton I wonder?

The weather was a little warmer this morning on the Sunny South Coast, not bikini weather you understand, just not so much in the way of frost and no rain which made the walk to work nicer but I still wore my floppy eared hat. The quest to find a longer way to get to work continues. This morning I walked the front of the stadium route but, instead of turning off and going past the back of the church I carried on until I reached the end of the New Bridge then walked all around the big car park, along the main road and right round the office. Even then I still had five minutes to make up the full forty five so I had to walk round the building again. One of my colleagues saw me and waved as I approached the building for the first time, he must have thought I was mad to walk right past. Maybe I am, either way it didn’t do my reputation for sanity much good. In two weeks the time goes up to fifty minutes, goodness knows what I’m going to do then.

There is a subway to go through at the end of the bridge because the junction there is far too busy to cross, I don’t fancy walking through there when the mornings are darker so I’m not sure if this is the route for me in the long term. Still it did give me some different plants to look at which always makes walking more interesting for a garden lover like me. It also tells me something about the weather, if old wives tales are to be believed anyway. I saw some Skimmia Japonica with lots of flowers, which is fairly normal for December, the one in my little walled garden has just started flowering but there were quite a few berries on the holly I saw and, knowing my own has a good crop too, makes me think we may have a harsh winter ahead. Not that these things are always true. Still best make sure I’ve got plenty of warm clothes just to be safe.

When I got to my desk this morning there were two huge boxes next to it one on top of the other. The top one had Arabella’s name on it and I asked Alice what on earth she’d ordered now. Quite often strange packages appear by my desk, books, magazines, carpet samples all sorts of things. Alice said, “Oh, those will be the Christmas presents.” Thinking she meant the passenger presents for the Christmas cruise I asked if anyone had arranged to get them out to the ship.”They’re not for the ship, they’re for the office,” she said, so I left them where they were, thinking I’d get round to them once I’d gone through my emails. It was a bit of a fraught morning with quite a few calls from entertainers about the cruise going out tomorrow and, despite the size of the boxes, I forgot all about them.

It was almost two o’clock before I stopped for lunch and then I had to dash up to town to the cash point. Alice was walking into town too so we walked together. It’s a fifteen minute walk, about a mile there and back, but now the shop on the corner is shut it’s the nearest place with a cash point and I had no money for bus fares if the weather turned bad during the day. As we were walking I asked Alice what she thought the presents were, I do like a good present. I was imagining lots of boxes of chocolates or something like that, the kind of thing we used to get at Dream Factory back in the good old days. Then again, maybe I just have chocolate on the brain.
“They’re probably hampers,” she said.
“Hampers? They’d have to be little ones wouldn’t they?” I said thinking of the size of the boxes, they were big but not big enough to be hampers for everyone. “What do you normally get?”
“They’re not for us, they’re for you and Arabella. They’re from the American company you order the films for the ship from. They send them every year.”
“Oh, I thought they were chocolates or something from Arabella.”
“I did wonder why you didn’t open yours. I thought you were a real cool customer having a big box like that and not even looking inside.”

Of course, as soon as we got back to the office and I took a closer look at the boxes, I could see one of them did have my name on. They also had the Harrods logo on the front. How exciting. Inside was a huge trunk, about two foot or more square with gold coloured clasps, leather handles and corners, almost like an old fashioned steamer trunk. Alice had to help me lift it out of the cardboard box because it weighted a ton and together we opened it. It was a Harrods hamper with three layers of goodies all packed in polystyrene. There were packets of fancy teas, beautiful cardboard canisters of biscuits, fudge, sweets, jams and two bottles of wine plus a fancy corkscrew.

As I’m the newest member of staff, I have to admit I felt dreadful to be the only one to have a present. In the end I handed round the biscuits (I didn’t even have one myself, aren’t I good?) but I will be taking the rest home when I can get Commando to pick me up in the car. Arabella’s box is even bigger and I imagine it’s an even larger, fancier hamper. I’m sure I can make good use of the trunk once it’s empty too and I think I’ll keep the fudge for myself. Then again it might be wiser if I give that away too. The woman from the movie company is lovely and I’ve had quite a few nice conversations with her so I sent her a thank you email. I hope she gets a nice present from the company herself. Being in America, I bet she’d love a Harrods hamper, but I suppose the shipping cost would be huge.

The clouds outside the window this afternoon didn’t look very healthy. There was one great big anvil shaped one that was particularly worrying. They usually mean a rain storm or snow and with the cold we’ve had and it now warming up I really wouldn’t be surprised if it snowed. That would make the walk to work interesting. At least it stayed dry for the walk home and I had company this evening too which is always nice. Gail was going to her boyfriend’s house Just up the road from me so we walked together. It also meant we could take the short cut through the estate, although it seemed extra dark tonight. We were walking through the cut way into the main part of the estate and it was so dark we couldn’t even see the path. Then we both tripped over the kerb at exactly the same time and we both looked around to make sure no one was around to notice. Luckily neither of us fell but it does make me think the short cut is probably a bad idea now it’s so dark in the evenings. Oh well, more walking is more exercise I guess.