Those aspirational slivers of minty luxury conjure up some memories. And music!

You can read the newsletter or listen to it, interspersed with 15 tracks (playlist below, and link to the Mixcloud stream) plus some vintage adverts. From Lola in Slacks to Lindsey Black via the Roches, Yvonne Lyon, Linda Thomson and more.

After Eight mints, AKA Chocolate Thins. This week you could buy them in our local shop, part of the slowly diminishing Christmas stock, last of the little festive luxuries in our remote corner of Shetland. And so I did, feeling the thrill of a truly adult purchase. It was like buying dope or underage Superlager. Or what I imagine that’s like, never having completed either transaction.

The box I bought two days ago is empty, now. And by that I mean devoid of the little envelopes each ‘wafer thin’ mint comes in. For there is nothing more annoying than scrabbling through a box of After Eights, only to find that some evil mintsnatcher has been rifling through the serried ranks, removing the (slightly rippled) chocolate fondant square, and then returning its empty casing. The frustration of walking your fingers through a box of emptiness – deceptive, rustling contained emptiness – desperately seeking sweetie salvation, is life-stunting. Humanity in all its foulness revealed.

It goes back to childhood, of course. After Eights were first produced by those ancient and very sussed Quaker marketeers and tooth-rotters Joseph Rowntree and Sons, in 1962, as they correctly identified a growing market for after dinner adult treats, signifiers of indulgence to sit with your rubbish percolated coffee. The French of course had the wee post-dessert sweeties sorted out decades previously. Now it’s called Café Gourmand, and is like Bake Off done by Lego but less crunchie. After Eights are a discreet English version, with those wee casings to prevent you getting your fingers sticky.

One 1970 advert has After Eights coming not just with coffee, but brandy and cigars as well. All the early commercials display wealth, Aristocratic Englishness, often expatriate, sophistication, very mature sex and money. There was no alcohol at my mum and dad’s dinner parties, but After Eights were like  armagnac or cognac – the whiff of something extreme, expensive and slightly decadent. Dark chocolate ( completely plain chocolate in the early days, but unsuitable for vegans now, as cow-favouring Nestlé have introduced buttermilk).

As a shorthand for luxury, it was once de rigueur at some Chinese and Indian restaurants for coffee to be served with a single cased After Eight mint in the saucer. Often the hot liquid would melt it into an unappetizing mess. And I have a memory of a brief trend at Sunday  high teas in the late 60s of After Eight sandwiches, crustless

squishy triangles, buttered, with crushed chocolate wafer things inside. Not something that would sit well with craft sourdough. 

As children we would joke about the late night treat called After Eight mince, and desperately rummage in discarded boxes for any stray square left behind. There never was. Just the empty paper husks. Adulthood in a box, emptiness within emptiness.

Rowntrees were long ago subsumed into the giant maw of Nestlé, who in 2012 closed the Castleford factory where the mints were made for years after a move from York, and shifted production to Halifax. Some are extruded in Germany and there are various more or less horrible flavours to be found in shelves throughout Europe, where mintiness is less favoured: marzipan and blood orange, to name but two. And the After Eight name has been applied to all kinds of product, from drinks to thick and workmanlike bars. Even what was once proudly marketed as Mintola is now bite-size chunky, utterly blasphemous pretend After Eight. They have so much fondant one bite coats gums and palate in a minty goo. Sugary toothpaste.

That A8 filling, by the way, is slightly weird.  It’s made from a flavoured sugar paste, water, and a small amount of an enzyme called  invertase. Once coated with chocolate, the enzyme has to mature for at least three days, gradually splitting the common sugar into the more soluble sugars glucose and fructose, resulting in a more liquid consistency. In other words AFTER EIGHT IS ALIVE!

These days the boxes are metric, longer and smaller. As something approximating an adult now, I can eat as many A8s as I like in one go, though the paper sheaths, those crinkly condoms of chocolate mintiness, prevent over-hasty consumption. The dark green box is lined with dark brown corrugated paper, the better to disguise the contents, and render them more mysterious. It also makes it harder to work out if there are any left.

There are not. 

The word is that the true, original 1962 After Eight taste can best be experienced through the offices of Ritter Sport’s peppermint offering, but I disagree. While a Fry’s Peppermint Cream and a Fry’s Chocolate Cream (alternate bites) can come close, nothing beats delving into the darkness of an After Eight box. It is a search for the sweetness of sin. And there is never enough.

Playlist. Click HERE to access the Mixcloud stream and have a listen

Lindsey Black — Flight

Richard and Linda Thompson — Dimming of the Day/Dargai

Clive Gregson and Christine Collister — It’s All Just Talk

Linda Ronstadt — Mohammed’s Radio

Emmylou Harris — Wrecking Ball

Judee Sill — Jesus was a Crossmaker

Kathryn Joseph — From When I Wake the Want Is

Lola in Slacks — Trocchi’s Canal

Roches — Hammond Song

Gillian Welch, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris — I’ll Fly Away

Lucinda Williams — Fruits of My Labour

Kate and Anna McGarrigle — Swimming Song

Joni Mitchell — A Bird That Whistles

Eddi Reader — Here come the Weak

Yvonne Lyon, Gareth Davies-Jones, David Lyon — Comfort in the Tragedy