This is a story about listening to your inner voice. Fear not, this column has not become about life coaching. But it’s all relevant. I got sent some chocolate this week, in the form of a record, a 7in ‘vinyl’ single. ‘I think you can play it,’ I gaily said. ‘No you can’t,’ said someone who will remain nameless and fancies themselves an aficionado. ‘Oh,’ I said, feeling deeply stupid, as if I’d watched too much Willy Wonka. ‘You can’t play a chocolate record,’ they added, ‘because it’d ruin the needle.’
Subdued, I snapped into this thick disc of 70% cocoa chocolate and ate it. The chocolate maker (from ‘bean to music’ they class themselves), Nadalina, is from Split in Croatia, and the man behind it, and on the record, is Marinko Biškić, a former singer in a punk band.
What a silly gimmick, I thought. But the idea that I might have been right (why make a disc out of chocolate otherwise?) niggled me until I contacted the British importers and said, ‘Isn’t it a bit misleading selling a chocolate record if you can’t play it?’ ‘But you can!’ they retorted and proceeded to send me a video of it. You need to set the needle to 1g and the anti-scale to neutral and obviously if the chocolate has melted in any way it won’t play. You can apparently play it up to five times and then you eat it, label and all. I wish I could critique the music, too, but as discussed, I can’t.
So the moral of this story is: trust yourself and be curious. This is an expensive way to eat chocolate (it costs £24 from cocoarunners.com), but a) the chocolate is really good and b) what a fab present for someone.
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