Hello and welcome
AQUILAnauts to a brand new
issue of AQUILA. It’s fair to say that
I love a bit of chocolate. OK, that’s
inaccurate. I love A LOT of chocolate.
Harvey calculates the speed of light with a
bar of chocolate and a microwave. (No
catapults or over-arm throwing required, ed.)
The moment we decided to produce a chocolate issue of
AQUILA two individual and totally unrelated thoughts
immediately sprang to mind. The first was ‘Mmmmm
chocolate’.
And the second – which followed on very quickly from the
first – was ‘Can we get anyone to send us some free
chocolate?’
The answer to that question – you’ll be interested to know
– is ‘Well, it depends’. In the end, we did manage to get our
lovely friends at Divine to give us some free chocolate, but
only if we promised to give it away to you guys (see page
23 for more details). Chocolate, it turns out, is not generally
free. Actually, it costs quite a lot to make. That’s because it
takes a lot of people to make a bar of chocolate. It’s a long
and drawn out process, a process that begins with a
humble midge.
These little cocoa midges have plenty of obstacles to
overcome in life. For a start, they’re tiny – as small as specks
of dust. They’re born in smelly, wet and rotting places, like
fermenting bean husks and animal poo. They are bad at
flying. They are only big enough to carry the right amount
of pollen to pollinate one cocoa flower at a time, and they
have a very small window in which to do it, because a cocoa
flower only lasts between 24 and 48 hours.
Oh, and they bite.
But these bite-y little midges are my new heroes. Why? Well,
because whatever these little midges lack in size, strength,
speed, flying ability, general hygiene, anger management
skills and, let’s face it, most other things – they more than
make up for in tenacity. They’re the only creature nimble
enough to get inside the tiny cacao flower, and for that
reason they are responsible for all the chocolate on the
entire planet.
You see, sometimes small things can achieve true greatness.
Mmmmm chocolate.
We hope you have an awesome
April. Please come back in May
for our marvellous
Maths in Nature issue.
We couldn’t do an issue devoted to chocolate
without also examining what happens in the body
when we eat it – particularly the very sugary kind.
Here’s Kit to tell us how our body uses sugar to
make things and do stuff.
Our resident life expert Kate Daniels says she specialises
in PSHE, but for the life of me I could never work out what
she meant. I have had a good long think though, and I’m
pretty sure I’ve cracked it; PSHE must stand for Penning
Sense and Helping Everyone. Check out Kate’s new
feature all about respect, here.
and Ian!
Will Joff find Aileen and escape from the
Baron and his malevolent machines? What’s
his lordship so scared about anyway? Find out
in part two of Amy Sparkes’ brand new and
exclusive short story, Time Waits.