Bittersweet: A Memoir. Angus Kennedy

      Preface

      Okay, I’m not into long lists of thank-yous extended to people neither of us would care to meet.

      However, there is one person I should mention: the anesthetist who yesterday put me to sleep for an operation to remove a cyst on my left knee. Yes, he deserves to be on my list of honors. Wow, those anesthetics are amazing. I mean, what is that drug they give you before the one that makes you sleep? You know, the one that says, Hey, Angus, it doesn’t matter if they chop off your entire leg or if chocolate runs out forever—nothing matters!

      Just looking into the anesthetist’s face, fully equipped with one dark eyebrow with the curious ability to move on its own, while the other, a light-colored one, remained stationary, was a good start. Watching this facial performance while he proceeded to proudly name all the drugs he was administering as my consciousness drifted into the ether: now that was pretty damned cool.

      Angus Kennedy you’re going down.

      It was a general anesthetic of course, and I fell asleep the moment I started to lie back and felt the nurse’s hands guide my head. The operation was, I say, almost a success. They found not one, but three “foreign bodies,” which they presented to me in a small blue pot when I woke up (now sent off for analysis), floating around the soft tissues at the back of my knee. Four years of pain are now almost over.

      I think I am high from yesterday’s drugs. I must be, and because of that and not being able to stand up, I am here now finishing this book on the couch with a single origin bar of French chocolate handy. (That is also keeping me on the couch!) So we should all thank him, and chocolate of course, and not a boring list of lifeless aunties and distant acquaintances.

      I’m a man with five kids, an impossibly busy job in confectionery conferencing and magazines, and never enough time even to escape to the bathroom in the mornings before I have to perform the most intolerable school runs ever in a ten-year-old Land Cruiser. So how was I ever going write a book—another book, even, I asked myself? But once I started, I knew it would be okay. You can’t leave off books when you write them. They’re like plants; they need feeding or they die.

      So now I am back home, sitting in the living room over the school holidays with my knee up and trying (rather foolishly) to concentrate with an Xbox on in the background and three overactive boys shooting anything they see on the screen. At last I have the chance—the book I have been meaning to finish will be finished, thanks to my wife, Sophie, now with a drugged-up cripple on the couch during Easter, who at every juncture is being asked, “What can I do now, Mum? I’m bored.”

      Ah, Easter: a period in which we in the United Kingdom spend about £2,462 million on chocolate, which translates into 70,000 tons of it, according to the International Cocoa Organization. Not much when the world munches through 7.6 million tons a year. Yes, a celebration during which British kids, on average, consume 8.8 chocolate eggs each; each egg averages about 750 calories. That’s 6,600 calories, enough for each child to run from London to Oxford without stopping.

      So I confess: my world—and the act of feeding my family—rely on chocolate. I have made a living out of “loving” a product that can rot your teeth, make you fat, take control, and see us all coming helplessly back