]Watford Museum presents...
Goal-den Years
A celebration of the history of Watford Football Club through collections and exhibitions of memorabilia and memories
Follow the Yellow Brick Road: Memories:
The Lucky Chocolate Shop
By Ian Grant
Martin's, on the corner of Vicarage Road
Photo by Sarah Jones
It's an important decision, not to be taken lightly. A judgement that requires striking a delicate balance between an enormous weight of experience and an instinctive sixth sense, between the successes and failures of the past and the particular needs of the present. In these moments of deliberation, everything hangs in the balance; by comparison, the manager's team selection is mere frippery.
The pre-match visit to the newsagent on the corner of Vicarage Road - and no other newsagent will do (away games excepted, naturally) - is only partly born of necessity. Really, it's all about lucky half-time chocolate. And it's not about any old lucky half-time chocolate either: the choice, made at great length while loitering indecisively in front of the chocolate displays, is absolutely vital.
For a solid, committed display, you want a bar in a similar vein: the Chunky Kit-Kat is a regular, dependable but unimaginative choice for these fixtures. If we're lacking a bit of flair and creativity, then it needs to be something a little further from the beaten track: the Smarties bar was a regular feature for a while, but supply proved to be unreliable, and the various Cadbury's milk-chocolate-with-stuff bars have come into favour recently. Sometimes, you just have to follow inspiration: the thoroughly unfashionable Double Decker had an impressive unbeaten run last season, while seasonal chocolate of various types is always hard to resist.
Sometimes, it works; sometimes, it doesn't. But the joy of this particular superstition is that it offers virtually endless possibilities for variation, refinement and experimentation. It'll never tire, and I imagine that in thirty or forty years' time, I'll still be humming and harring in front of the chocolate display, before joining the queue that snakes absurdly around the entire shop and getting annoyed at the people who cheat by mock-innocently forming their own tiny queue by the magazine racks. Some things never change; some things never need to change.
The irony, of course, is that I don't actually like chocolate that much, really. Not bothered, most of the time. We all have to make sacrifices for the team, though, right?
Added to the exhibition on 06/10/2004