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.

The Chocolate-Free Blog, Days 1-3

The best-laid plans of a failed chartered accountant never run smooth. I had expected this to rapidly become one long whinge about all of the chocolate I hadn't eaten, and all of the surprisingly embarassing things that I had actually eaten instead. Yet nearly three days into Lent I've written nothing at all.

This isn't because I've deliberately given up blogging. It isn't because I ate three Mars bars for breakfast on Ash Wednesday and am hiding in shame until I can think of something funny to say about it; I actually had a pear, a yogurt and a handful of sultanas. It isn't even because I've fallen out with the charming BT call centre somewhere in India which always cuts me off after failing to understand anything I've said, which is what usually happens when my broadband connection dies.

No. My body responded to the lack of chocolate by shutting down. Admittedly, I hadn't been feeling 100% for the past week or so - so I even made sure that I kept my sugar intake up by eating some rather odd Skittles Sours in the University of London Library on Wednesday morning (there was someone else sitting there eating something out of a lunchbox with a fork, so I'm thinking the 'no eating and drinking' thing is largely symbolic), and having two Appletizers in the pub on Wednesday evening. However, while still in the pub, my head started to hurt. Taking paracetamol seemed to do nothing for it, and when we left the pub (in theory to go and get some food) my eye-sockets started to hurt with every step I took. So I skipped dinner, and went home, figuring that an early night would undoubtedly 'fix' whatever it was that seemed to be holding my head in a vice and doing strange things to my eyeballs.

After a night during which I didn't sleep because it hurt too much - even though I couldn't even open my eyes without it hurting more - and during which I kept trying to move my head into a position which hurt less, only to find myself shaking uncontrollably every time I moved, I was a bit less sanguine about the whole thing. In fact, I was about 50% convinced I was dying, and panicking because my husband and I hadn't sorted out our wills. I even got the husband to Google symptoms of meningitis before I sent him out on a drug hunt yesterday morning (I was mostly reassured by the conclusion, and have since resisted the temptation to Google it myself to see if he actually got the right answer).

I managed about two hours out of bed yesterday, with the assistance of the type of neurofen which has codeine in it (it took about an hour and half to kick in, and only worked for about an hour or so - but at least it did sort of take the edge off things). By the end of the day I was no better than I had been at the beginning of it, and I was becoming even more convinced that I was dying - to the extent that I was even contemplating an interaction with the medical profession.

Thankfully, I fell asleep sometime around midnight, and when I woke up at about half past five this morning my temperature had gone back to normal. I still had to keep my eyes shut when it got light - although that has gradually got better in the course of the day, and I even made it as far as Waitrose in Fulham this afternoon (and got some Malted Milk biscuits, which tasted weird and sugary - but that might just be because they are). So chocolate hasn't really been a big issue yet. Hopefully I have that battle still to come.