Struggling with yens and inkling

It was evening, there isn't a shop that sells flakey chocolate bars within miles of our house, and it was getting too late to go out anyway, so the yen had temporarily stifled. My wife, ever sympathetic, said next time we were in the supermarket I ought to buy one, and I said I would.

I could almost taste the thing even as we talked about it; I could recall the texture of the chocolate as I bit into it, carefully holding the wrapping paper under my chin, because, being flakey, small pieces of it always drop off it as you bite, and if they fall on your clothes they can make a terrible mess.

Flakey chocolate is not ideal for eating in the dark. When you go to the cinema for instance. Eaten without due care, it can result in an enforced trip to the dry-cleaners.

Despite its inclination to crumble at the first sign of an approaching mouth, the flakey chocolate bar has always been one of my strong favourites.

I like caramel bars, dark chocolate bars of any kind, chocolate whirls with marshmallow in the middle, and chocolate truffle bars.

But I have a special liking for flakey bars. Hence my sudden yen.

Have you noticed that yens are nearly always sudden?

They don't creep up on you gradually, like a headache, a snooze or one of those people with clipboards who ambush people on Fargate.

Yens, by their very nature, creep up on you without you noticing and slap you round the back of your neck without warning, to make you sit up and take notice. Herein lies the crucial differentiation between a yen and an inkling.

One is sudden and violent, the other is gradual and gentle. You can dismiss an inkling and file it away in the back of your mind for a day or two, but yens demand attention.

Even so, I don't always do anything about my yens. Not long ago I wrote to a man who makes small garden huts, or summer houses, in the shape and design of traditional railway signal boxes, complete with sliding windows and a step or two up to the door.

I asked him to send me his illustrated catalogue and explained, quite shamelessly, that I had always had a yen for a little railway signal box in my back garden.

'He sent me his catalogue and chatty covering letter'

He sent me his catalogue and a chatty covering letter in which he said that I was the first person he had ever known who confessed that he had a yen for signal box.

He seemed surprised. So was I. Surely, I thought, there must be lots of people who would like a mini signal box as a garden shed.

The illustrations in the catalogue were very tempting, but this particular yen has had to go on hold. The prices listed alondside the illustrations were a shade high for me.

I might have a try at building my own signal box-cum-hut. I think I could make a pretty good job of something like that.

But first of all I'm going to have a flakey chocolate bar.