101 YEARS OLD AND STILL BOTHERED BY BISCUITS...

TWO years have passed since the biscuits/chocolates referendum was conducted in this office and some aspects have yet to be resolved. As you will recall, I have, for many years, been bringing home-made biscuits into the office to offer to my colleagues as giving people biscuits is easier and ultimately more useful than talking to them. Problems arose when I started sometimes bringing in homemade chocolates as an alternative.

Two lobbies formed: Bixit, who wished to phase out biscuits and Choxit who proposed putting an end to the chocolate distribution. Seeking to settle the matter democratically, we held a referendum which was won by the chocolate-loving Bixit side.

The biscuit-lovers however made all sorts of objections, even suggesting that the timing of the referendum in the morning biased the results in favour of those who wanted chocolates with their morning coffee rather than dunking biscuits in their afternoon tea.

I then proposed a two-year transition period, during which both chocolates and biscuits would be offered, on the understanding that work would continue towards designing a chocolate-covered biscuit that could be served one way up as a biscuit and the other way up as a chocolate.

The recent hot weather however has had the adverse effect of causing the thick layers of chocolate on these replacement biscuits to melt, resulting in piles of them sticking together with calamitous results. Indeed, on one occasion fisticuffs broke out in the Beachcomber Towers’ kitchen between a patissier, in charge of biscuit baking, and a chocolatier responsible for the chocolate coating. Both blamed the other for ruining their creations and reluctantly I have had to dismiss the pair of them.

Meanwhile, seeing the effect the warm weather has had on chocolates has caused several voters to think again about the desirability of such confectionery. Following the American President’s recent correction of his earlier assertion that Russians are a noble, honourable and trustworthy people, and saying that he had intended to say that they are a bunch of hooligans who interfere with elections and travel to other countries to kill people with Novichok, these colleagues of mine say that if they’d known about Novichok at the time, they’d never have voted for chocolates and anyway when they said they wanted biscuits phased out, what they meant was that they love biscuits and chocolates melt in the sun anyway.

All of this, of course, has left me in a bit of a quandary, made even more urgent by Mrs Beachcomber’s threat that if I don’t sort it out pretty quickly, she may go on record to claim that when she said “I do” at our marriage ceremony all those years ago, what she actually meant was “I don’t”.

I was not keeping a close eye on Mrs B during President Trump’s recent visit to the UK but I would not be surprised to hear that she had met the First Lady who may have given her the idea.

Bixit? Choxit? Marie Antoinette and Boris Johnson jointly had it right: Let them have their cake and eat it.