DEATH'S DOOR

If you’re a novelist, as I often am, you spend a lot of time trying 

to come up with the ‘right’ names for characters. 

You try to make them sound appropriate and plausible without being too schematic.  You would never for example name a dentist Colin Clamp, but that was the name of the local dentist here in Manningtree until recently.  And you’d never call a character De’Ath – because readers are sure to think he or she is a harbinger of death.  Nevertheless here in Manningtree we have De’aths Bakery.  Their loyalty card doesn’t even bother with the apostrophe.

 

And in the window of De’aths there was a tray of ‘Callebaut Chocolate Cream Truffles’.  (The Callebut is Octaaf Callebaut who began making chocolate in Belgium in 1911).  I bought one.   I sliced it open and it looked this.

 

I suppose they got the idea from the Scotch egg – a cream egg in sponge with chocolate cream and grated truffle on the outside.  It was great. The sponge and the chocolate cream were so intense that I felt the store-bought cream egg would be a bridge too far, and a bit of a letdown so I didn’t crack it open.  It wouldn’t have been ‘death by chocolate,’ but it would have been close.