In Defence of the Second Biscuit

It has become fashionable, in certain circles I no longer visit, to decline the second biscuit. The first biscuit, they will tell you, is pleasure; the second is weakness. I have given this doctrine the consideration it deserves, which is a great deal, and I have concluded that it is the single most cowardly idea our century has produced, and that our century has produced a great many.

Consider the position of the second biscuit. It arrives on the plate in perfect faith. It has done nothing wrong. It is, in every measurable respect, identical to the first, which was welcomed like a returning son. And yet at the very threshold of the mouth it is turned away, on grounds of character, by a man patting his own waistcoat as though consulting an oracle. I find this treatment barbaric. I find it, frankly, un-English. We did not build a civilisation, and several unnecessary conservatories, in order to ration ourselves at the exact moment joy became available in multiples.

The case against the second biscuit is always made in the language of the future. One is asked to picture a later, thinner, more virtuous self who will one day thank one for the restraint. I have met this self. He is insufferable. He stands at the edge of every pleasant afternoon holding a small clipboard, and he has never, in all our long acquaintance, thanked me for anything.

(There is a school of thought, associated chiefly with my physician and with Gerald, that the second biscuit leads inevitably to the third, and the third to ruin. To which I say: it may. Rome led to ruin. We do not, on that account, refuse to visit.)

And so I took the second biscuit, in full view of the assembled company, as a matter of principle. And I will tell you what I discovered. It was too much. The second biscuit, reader, is one biscuit too many, and I knew it at the halfway mark, when the joy of the first had already left the building and the biscuit and I were alone together, going through the motions, like a marriage in its final autumn. The doctrine, it turns out, was correct. I renounce everything above. I renounce it with biscuit still in hand, which is the only honest way to renounce anything.

I shall have a third, to be certain. Rigour demands it. A conclusion reached over two biscuits is an anecdote; a conclusion reached over four is science. I expect to reverse myself again at around the fifth, at which point I will have proven, conclusively and for all time, whatever it is I happen to believe by then.

Firmly, and until further notice,

Mr Fickle