‘Hey, look what I won, a mug with chocolate things on sticks.’
His colleague looks up. ‘What’s that?’ she asks.
‘It’s a mug, right, and…’ reading the instructions on the chocolate swizzle stick, he explained how ‘you pour boiling milk into the mug and then stir the chocolate thing round on the stick till it melts and you’ve got hot chocolate. Two flavours, mint and bourbon.’
‘Bourbon?’
‘Yeah. Do you want one? I don’t really want both. I’m keeping the mug though.’
‘Yeah? Oh, thanks, yeah.’
‘Which d’you fancy?’
‘I don’t mind, whichever you don’t want.’
‘I think I’d prefer the mint chocolate, so you can have the bourbon,’ he says.
‘Ok, cheers. I’d never have thought of making bourbon flavour. that’s really unusual.’
‘Innit? Weird. That’s why I’m sticking with the mint. I know what to expect. I can’t really imagine bourbon flavoured hot chocolate.’
‘Oh I’m sure it’ll be nice. I like bourbons.’
‘Me too, but I’m not sure about the flavour as a drink, y’know?’
I can take no more.
‘Surely it’s bourbon flavour,’ I interject.
The girl looks as the chocolate swizzle stick she’s been given. ‘No, it says bourbon flavour.’
‘Yes,’ I reply, but bourbon and bourbon are spelled the same but are pronounced differently.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Positive. And I’d wager that it’s bourbon whiskey flavoured chocolate rather than biscuit flavoured chocolate.’
‘It might be biscuit.’
‘But I would expect that it’s probably whiskey.’
‘Well I’m going to drink it at the weekend and I’ll let you know if you’re right next week.’
***
‘So,’ I begin, trying to suppress a smirk, ‘was it whiskey or biscuit?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The hot chocolate thing you had. The bourbon / bourbon chocolate on a stick, what flavour was it, whiskey or biscuit?’
‘Biscuit,’ she replied.
‘No? Really?’ I couldn’t hide my incredulity.
‘Yeah. Well I didn’t have it in the end, my friend did, but she couldn’t taste any whiskey. I looked at the ingredients and there was no alcohol in it, so it must have been biscuit.’
‘How would you taste biscuit?’
‘It mostly just tasted of chocolate, but there was definitely no alcohol. So I was right all along, it was bourbon, and not bourbon.’
‘But why would they make biscuit flavoured chocolate?’ I asked, amazed.
‘Well they make chocolate flavoured biscuits.’
There’s no arguing with logic like that.
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