The Companion 016: Chocolate shops

I've been getting comfortable in my own company.

Film still via Miramax, Chocolat (2000)

I’ve been spending a lot of time in artisan chocolate shops this past month. There’s this rich, dark smell when you walk in. The air feels heavy with sugar and preserved milk. It is the smell of importation, colonialism and craftsmanship. It’s an indulgent smell, but perhaps it shouldn’t be. You’d think spending time in artisan chocolate shops means that I am rich. I am not rich (I am rich in the context of colonialism), and I do not spend a lot in these shops. I go to them when I’m alone, to hide from the cold or to seek out warmth and sugar in secret. I drink rich hot chocolates and I’m usually given at least two chocolates to try for free. The staff are often friendly and bored and passionate. Chocolate shops are a great place to go when you’re alone.

I’ve become more used to spending time by myself in recent years. It’s funny that often people assume that I’m good with my own company because I’m an only child — but I was very much almost always with people in my childhood. If anything I, or my parents, overcompensated for my lack of siblings. The relationships that I built up with friends were constant and enduring. I became such a permanent fixture in some of my friends’ houses that my parents joked about paying them a stipend for my dinners in my mid-teens. If we weren’t together then we were on long, meandering phone calls to each other on the landline (I’ve heard that Gen Z do this with FaceTime, which makes me happy). On Christmas Day, I used to spend at least three hours with two of my closest friends, traipsing off into the cold to spend snatches of time with them and their families, a sweet trio, plied by grandmothers with bottles of wine and a liberal pour, and fathers with trays of mince pies and funny gifts.

Spending time alone then, has been something I have learned to not just tolerate, or want to do in the privacy of my own home, but, sometimes, actively enjoy when I’m in public. I’d say it’s only in the past few years I’ve started to enjoy doing quite aimless things by myself. I can, if I want, spend an hour in a chocolate shop and then walk for another hour to visit a different chocolate shop and compare the flavours of the robust Costa Rican 72% to the mild sweetness of the pistachio sable and I can decide that this one will make a perfect gift because that person has just as big a sweet tooth as me. Being alone, I’ve realised, doesn’t mean I am ever actually alone because the people I love follow me in memory, in thought patterns, in how I seek them out in the solo experiences I’m having and the moments that I envisage us having together in future.

It’s been an interesting month, the first month of 30.

I spent approximately two weeks struck down by health anxiety and leant heavily on friends for reassurance (are they a best friend if you can’t call them up crying about the fact that your lip is twitching and you googled it and it said you probably had a progressive disease?) I wrote a difficult piece about growing up as the ‘black friend’ in Scotland which is now swamped in the afterbirth of accountability thanks to some ongoing and difficult conversations about its content. I’ve been dwelling a lot on the crisis in Palestine, on the constant stream of deaths and heartbreak that we’re seeing in real-time, and speaking about it with friends who feel varying levels of gloom, anger and betrayal. I’m trying to write a book and I’m trying to make sure I have enough money to see me through into 2024, when I’ll be moving to Oxford for six months to start a journalism fellowship.

I have spent a lot of time alone this month and I am worried about what that does to the psyche, what betrayal is lurking there at the edges of distraction, when I can’t quite convince myself that my worries are, as my therapist said, hypothetical and not practical. But with practice, being alone has its comforts, it has its sweetness. I have become one of those people who makes conversation with strangers, just like my mum and aunty do sometimes, just like one of my close friends, Jess, does with the workers at coffee shops and libraries she frequents. I’m not a natural because I worry that I’m being fake, but, I remembered the other day, I quite liked it when I worked in the service industry and didn’t care if people were only speaking for my benefit.

So yes, in chocolate shops, ridiculously, I find comfort and the ability to be alone. Still, the best experiences, much like chocolate, I do think are almost always shared.

Some of the best in London to go visit with your pals, or by yourself (tried and tested):

Dark Sugars, Shoreditch (gorgeous hot chocolate with a ton of shavings, and nice, simple selection of truffles — plus, black-owned)

Le Chocolat Alain Ducasse, Kings Cross (beautiful selection of dark chocolates and unusual chocolate structures)

CassPea, Selfridges (really nice selection of unusual flavour bombs, including olive oil, guava cheesecake and pineapple, yuzu and cardamom)

William Curley Patissier Chocolatier, Soho (gorgeous tucked away shop, really nice baked goods alongside unusual flavoured bars and bites)

Italian Bear Chocolate, Soho (pastries looked stale but go here for their lusciously thick hot chocolate)

Pierre Marcolini, Marylebone (delicious upmarket French fare)

Knoops, Covent Garden (not officially a chocolate shop but this wee chain does do damn good hot chocolate)