101 YEARS OLD AND STILL HANDING OUT BISCUITS...

ALMOST two years have passed since a referendum was held in this office on the vexed question of whether they would prefer me to bring home-made biscuits or home-made chocolates to offer round at tea time or coffee time, yet the issue is still unresolved.

As you will no doubt recall, the vote resulted in a clear majority for the Bixit (eliminating biscuits) supporters over the pro-Biscuit Choxit side but negotiations over how to implement the result have been mired in difficulty and wanton obstruction.

Biscuits lovers say that the Bixit voters did not understand what they were voting for and the question on the ballot paper offered too stark a choice by lumping all the flavours, shapes and sizes of biscuit together in one category.

People who did not want ginger biscuits, for example, found themselves in the same Bixit lobby as those who did not appreciate my passion fruit and white chocolate concoctions. Even some Jaffa Cake haters voted for Bixit, though I have never made a Jaffa.

My two-year transition period, during which both biscuits and chocolates have continued to be offered, was welcomed by the Choxiteers, and accepted with some suspicion by the Bixit side but my proposal of a BixChoc Partnership based on chocolatecovered biscuits that could be presented as chocolates by turning them upside down has been met with howls of protest.

Worst of all, the rumblings of discontented stomachs continue to grow over the lack of progress on arrangements to resolve problems concerning the frontier between the Daily and Sunday papers. While I have frequently given biscuits or chocolates to needy Sunday staff, this has necessarily been a noncontractual arrangement as the Beachcomber column appears only on weekdays. No such problem has existed for the web pages, whose staff are adamant that they should continue receiving biscuit benefits after Bixit is enacted.

This raises the prospect of my giving biscuits to the Sunday web page crew who then pass them on to their print colleagues in clear defiance of Bixit. Nobody has yet come up with a convincing answer to this problem to avoid the creation of a strife-prone hard biscuit border in the office.

There have been suggestions that a technological biscuit-crumb counter may be developed to detect any such snack-smuggling but it may be years before we can hope for such a solution to be effective.

Even if that works, however, die-hard Choxiteers have been demanding another referendum, supposedly to ensure that the people approve of whatever is decided.

This, they say, will avoid the supposed defects of the previous referendum by asking not only whether the voters want biscuits or chocolates, but to specify the flavours, shapes and sizes they prefer, whether they want them with morning coffee or afternoon tea and whether the chocolate used in all or any of the items chosen should be dark, milk or white.