The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work - Alain De Botton [14]
Much to the frustration of experts in both fields, Crackers & Crispbreads and Savoury Biscuits are routinely confused. To be clear, Crackers & Crispbreads are non-sweet biscuits intended to be eaten either as part of a diet or as an accompaniment to cheese or a spread, while Savoury Biscuits are to be enjoyed on their own and offer greater interest than standard crackers, usually thanks to the addition of a cheese or barbecue flavour. Activity in this final category has tended in recent years to be focused on the introduction of diminutive products such as the Mini Cream Cheese and Chive, the Baked Mini Cheddar and the Snack-A-Jack Mini Barbecue.
2.
Hayes itself was surprisingly devoid of charm. There were few restaurants, only one bowling alley and no cinemas. Such were the limitations of the place, a young woman I met in the course of my research told me that she would only ever accept a date with someone in nearby Hillingdon – a town which did not for that matter, at least on a cursory drive through it, strike me as having any notable advantages over its neighbour.
The biscuit company occupied a three-storey beige-brick building on a business park. It had for the previous five years been owned by a pair of private equity firms, one of which, the Blackstone Group, was headed by a financier legendary for buying the most expensive duplex in the history of Manhattan. Among the company’s most popular brands were McVitie’s, go ahead!, Twiglets, Hula Hoops, McCoy’s and KP Nuts. It also produced the prawn-flavoured cocktail snack Skips, known for its uniquely fizzy reaction with human saliva. A brochure in the lobby explained that United Biscuits took its social responsibilities seriously and that it had, through its Jaffa Cake Division, donated a number of shirts with logos on them to an under-seven football team in the town of Ruislip.
Laurence met me by the lifts, under the shadow of a giant bag of crisps. He was a volatile mixture of confidence and vulnerability. He could deliver extended monologues on professional matters, then promptly stop in his tracks to peer inquisitively into his guest’s eyes for signs of boredom or mockery, being intelligent enough to be unable fully to believe in his own claims to significance. He might, in a past life, have been a particularly canny and sharp-tongued royal advisor. One might have supposed that our mutual premature baldness would have led to a rapprochement, but the shared disability only generated an unwanted point of identification.
Laurence led me to the boardroom, where a table had been scattered with boxes of Moments, a six-centimetre-wide biscuit made of chocolate and shortcake, launched in the spring of 2006 at a ceremony (during which Laurence had made a speech in French) in a manufacturing plant in Belgium, following a two-year-long, £3 million development programme. Laurence was the biscuit’s author.
3.
This was not to say that Laurence knew how to bake, though he grew swiftly defensive in response to my expression of surprise at his inability. Biscuits are nowadays a branch of psychology, not cooking, he advised sternly.
Laurence had formulated his biscuit by gathering some interviewees in a hotel in Slough and, over a week, questioning them about their lives, in an attempt to tease out of them certain emotional longings that could subsequently be elaborated into the organising principles behind a new product. In a conference room in the Thames Riviera hotel, a number of low-income mothers had spoken of their yearning for sympathy, affection and what Laurence termed simply, with aphoristic brevity, ‘me-time’.