A few years ago I went to live in Nottingham, first time living away from home at university. First time doing a full food shop for myself, I spied a pack of Hovis biscuits. Now, these particular biscuits, I hadn't a clue still existed: my earliest memory is in a hospital bed some twenty years ago, post-operation, and I've been given one of these biscuits to try and eat, and it is the most wretched, disgusting things I have ever tasted. So, I decide, it can't be that bad now, can it? I put it in the basket, continued my shopping, then brought them out again when I got home. Taking one out of the packet, I stared at it for a while. I attributed to this biscuit my medical phobias, my ultimate and most unreasonable failings: the reason I had to leave biology classes in high school whenever they started playing a video, the reason I couldn't visit friends in hospital, the reason I'd have to be found and effectively talked into going to the mandatory injections at primary school. It literally insults my intelligence that I feel the need to remove myself from these things or end up unconscious on the floor, and it's all because of this one experience as a child, and this one biscuit.
I eat it. It's just like a normal digestive. Damn it.
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