Chocolate, dark

I've been reading more of The Chocolate Wars, and continue to be struck by the strangeness of the Kit-Kat being invented. It's a chocolate-coated proof of the claim that technology is anything invented after your twentieth birthday; those chocolate-coated wafer biscuits are so much part of the fabric of the world that it seems impossible that there was a time before the Kit-Kat. It seems even more strange, somehow, that the Kit-Kat was invented, had a date on which it came into being, rather than being discovered.

Unlike Maltesers, which have been grown in the Falkland Islands for over a thousand years after they were first domesticated.

There's another important piece of information, a quotation I wish I'd had in my dissertation on charity for my Master's degree:
"I can conceive of no greater mistake, more disastrous in the end to religion if not to society, than of trying to make charity do the work of justice."
Philanthropists, you can't trust 'em any further than you can throw their trust funds.

As well as reading the origin stories of the Anglo-Saxon confectioners (either be a Quaker or, if American, have an absentee father) I did a little more work on my novel, and then settled down to watch some more of Edge of Darkness (the original, tree-obsessed TV series, not the Mel Gibson version). It's odd, knowing the original scripted ending to hear Craven's daughter telling him he needs to be strong, "like a tree", and it's also odd, seeing how much of Edge of Darkness I've forgotten. Again, it's technology invented before I was twenty. Like Joe Don Baker's enormous face.