KENDAL MINT CAKE

One of my colleagues is back from hols and has brought in some lovely Kendal Mint Cake.

Now, halfway up a mountain when you're feeling like all your energy has been sapped by nature, a little nibble on some Kendal Mint Cake is a pickup that gives your body everything it thinks it needs. Freezing? Feeling like your red-raw fingers are going to drop-off at any minute - a square of this stuff'll soon get the blood flowing and the adrenaline coursing around your system!

In a stuffy office though, on a Tuesday morning, after a half-decent breakfast, eating a chunk of genuine, straight-from-the-lakes, original-and-best KMC... is like chomping your way through a slice of solid toothpaste.

It is so minty. In fact, it's almost all mint and sugar - enough to tingle the nostrils and sting the eyes like that teatree flavour of 'Original' shower gel.

I looked it up on Wikipedia. Apparently, Sir Edmund Hillary took some up Everest with him, in 1953.

"We sat on the snow and looked at the country far below us... we nibbled Kendal Mint Cake... It was easily the most popular item on our high altitude ration - our only criticism was that we did not have enough of it."

Shackleton too, carried it on his 1914 Endurance Expedition across Antarctica.

Endurance, the ship, was eventually sunk in pack-ice in 1915, while Shackleton and his men escaped to Elephant Island. That's quite a story of adventure, and human spirit, and who knows, maybe it wouldn't have been possible without good old Kendal Mint Cake.

Funnily enough though, the triumph of the human spirit against the elements, on a polar adventure in a brave new world, doesn't precisely map itself to a drizzly Tuesday morning in the documentation department.

And the Kendal Mint Cake, which was excellent when I was in the Lake District, suddenly seems a little sickly, a little bit unusual, and very-much out-of-place. Not that I'm not grateful for people bringing cakes in! Far from it - it's actually a really sweet tradition, and I would have done the same, probably. It's just interesting how odd a thing can seem in the wrong environment.

Of course, that might just be me.