Jelly Belly Funtime

Consider the following:

1. I was born opposite the Rowntree’s chocolate factory in Norwich (now replaced by a [shudder] mall).
2. My favorite segment on Playschool was where we went through the round/square/arch window to see how milk bottle processing factories worked.
3. My favorite episode of Bagpuss involved the mice on the mice organ making digestive biscuits.
4. At age 12, I joined the British Association Of Young Scientists (geek!) just so that I could go on tours of the Lotus car plant in Norfolk and the afore-mentioned Rowntree’s chocolate factory.
5. I can’t remember most of what I learnt at university, but I can recall the type of containers Rowntree’s stored the hard centres in before coating them in chocolate.
6. I once ate my way through a pound of toasted marshmallow and buttered popcorn jelly bellies in an afternoon at work.
7. Good Eats is my favorite show on Food Network, and Alton Brown is a god (with thanks to Rory Schadler, with whom I watched episodes of Good Eats when last in the US).

Given all that, is it any wonder that this is top of my list of things to see in California next month? And that I now think I should have been a food scientist, rather than an editor? I blame my secondary school, whose timetables meant that I had to take physics – a subject that made me cry – instead of chemistry. I wonder if I could sue?