Days 4 and 5

I am happy to report that although I suspect that my ongoing codeine consumption is taking the edge off some of the withdrawal symptoms (I know that's not a good swap but the left hand side of my neck now keeps trying to go into spasm, and I'm not very good at pain), I have at least started displacing some of my typical chocolate-related behaviours onto the (utterly dismal) substitutes with which I have been experimenting.

Yesterday, for example, I got up and made myself one of the two relatively healthy breakfasts in my repertoire (it was the fruit and yoghurt scenario again - the other one is porridge, although I suspect that ought to be marked down on account of the quantity of golden syrup I usually have with it). I sat and ate it slowly, and tried not to get to irate about the fact that the husband was about to disappear and leave me on my own all day, and even washed up the bowl and wiped down the kitchen work surfaces. I then wandered round the flat, in a circuit starting and ending in front of the kitchen sink, concluding that there was nothing that I wanted to do and that everything was pretty shit. And then I ate all of the rest of the Malted Milk biscuits. And although I started to feel slightly sick before I had finished them, the sense that natural order would be restored if I finished the packet (rather than leaving a couple in the bottom of the biscuit jar, which would also happen to stand as evidence to my general lack of self control...) kept me going until there were just a few largish crumbs left in the wrapper. I then shoved the wrapper in the bin, and hated myself for being fat.

So at one level I clearly don't need chocolate at all. But the chemical composition of Malted Milk biscuits (even slightly dodgy ones from Waitrose - I never quite got over the idea that there was somehow something wrong with them. It was as if the sugar in them was crunchy, which isn't how I remember them...) clearly isn't quite the same, as the sense of disgust wasn't followed by the mild euphoria that a chocolate binge usually brings. Which is possible why I did the same thing with a packet of rice cakes in the evening, to even less effect.

If I think about chocolate, milk Lindor is definitely what I am missing most, though. I don't even eat it that often - although I ate an awful lot of it in the couple of weeks before Christmas, when I tried tying the red truffles to the tree in lieu of 'proper' tree chocolates but then kept eating them all with indecent haste and leaving tell-tale tree needles all over the floor. Eventually I bought some of the humdrum Cadbury's purple tree chocolates instead, at least some of which survived until the tree came down. But I first met Lindor when I was a student in Paris, which is an association which does nothing to diminish its charms. Towards the end of my time there, when I had fallen out with both my boyfriends (the English one and the French one) and decided that I wasn't going to achieve anything anyway, I took to going to Monoprix late most afternoons to buy Lindor and orange juice. I'm guessing it probably counted as supper. Good, rose-tinted, times.