At 2am on Sunday 25 October, the country will be handed an hour it did not ask for and cannot spend. Most of us will sleep through it. The rest of the week, we pay it back with interest, in the form of a sky that goes dark at a quarter to five.
This is generally treated as bad news. We would gently suggest it is the oldest excuse in the English chocolate calendar.
A Frenchman in Queen's Head Alley
Chocolate arrived in London not as a bar but as a drink, and not in a shop but in an alley. In June 1657, a notice in the Publick Advertiser announced that in Bishopsgate Street, in Queen's Head Alley, at a Frenchman's house, there was "an excellent West India drink called chocolate", to be had "ready at any time".
It is a modest piece of copy. No adjectives beyond "excellent", no claims about health or happiness, and a promise of availability that any modern retailer would recognise. It worked. Within a few decades chocolate houses had spread across the city, clustering around St James's, where the people who could afford imported cacao tended to live. White's opened on St James's Street as a chocolate house in 1693. It is still there, as a private members' club, having quietly stopped serving the thing it was named for.
Samuel Pepys, who recorded most things, recorded this too. On the morning after the coronation of Charles II in 1661, having celebrated with some commitment the night before, he took chocolate "to settle my stomach". The English relationship with the drink was, from the start, both social and medicinal, and occasionally both at once.
Why it belongs to the dark months
None of these early drinkers were having a cup of something sweet and powdery. Seventeenth-century chocolate was made from ground cacao, beaten with hot water or milk, often spiced, and thick enough to coat the spoon. It was a slow drink for a long evening, which is precisely what late October now provides in quantity.
The practical case is simple. Chocolate is best eaten slowly, at room temperature, when nobody is waiting for you to do something else. Summer is poor at all three. It is too warm for the chocolate, too light for staying in, and too full of other plans. An evening that is dark by five has none of these problems. It has, if anything, a surplus of the one ingredient chocolate needs most, which is time.
There is also something to be said for treating the change of the clocks as an occasion rather than an inconvenience. The calendar is generous with chocolate moments in spring and winter, and conspicuously quiet in between. The last Sunday in October is not a holiday, has no cards and requires no gifts. It simply arrives, takes an hour away from the daylight, and leaves you indoors. That seems a reasonable moment to open something good.
A note on proportion
The Frenchman of Queen's Head Alley sold his chocolate in cups. Ours comes in rather more architectural shapes, but the principle has not changed in nearly four hundred years: real cacao, made properly, taken unhurriedly. If the country insists on giving everyone a longer evening, it would be ungracious not to use it.
The hour itself, of course, happens at 2am, and is best spent asleep. It is the other ones we had in mind.