I am no stranger to spending my time in a trance-like state buying things online. My last purchase, ‘la Mer – the lip-balm’ from American eBay (which came in at under half-price, including delivery, in comparison to retail prices here) should be arriving at work today. However, I am still off sick, and in a break from our pursuit of chocolate nirvana, the three of us currently at home (waving a stir-crazy ‘hi’ to our housemate, Busy), have found a new boredom-combating activity to keep us occupied. One of my favourite sites on which to while away the hours is Cityscope, which the stand-in lurve partner, Grumpy, and I have dubbed ‘real estate porn’. As we are destined due to some very basic biological incompatibities never to consummate our relationship, and are therefore in need of some other frisson to create the illusion of a healthy lurve partnership, we often spend Saturday afternoons after going to the market, browsing through it, planning our future lottery win disbursement. (If you visit it, please make sure you have a look at the £7 million property in Covent Garden. Grumpy likes the space for five cars, with a turntable for choosing which one you are going to drive today. I like the fact that the wine cellar is bigger than the staff bedroom. )

Last night as I was trawling the web in idle contemplation, I found a link to a new site, Nethouseprices.com which has accessed the land registry so that you can see the sale value of houses sold anywhere in the UK in the past 5 years. Various articles written about it in online supplements in the last couple of days make the observation that this is likely to feed the ‘net-curtain-twitching’ tendencies of our ‘keep up with the Joneses’ society. One journalist even went so far as to look up all his neighbouring properties, and then phone up their owners to ask them how they felt about him knowing how much they had paid.

I am not sure that there is an issue here. Obviously the benefits of the site are that if you are looking at buying a property, you can check out the area beforehand, make sure that the prices have recently been rising and not falling, and that the asking price is in line with recent sales in the neighbourhood. A very good resource, as anyone who has ever bought a house, and wondered how on earth they are going to deconstruct the ‘up-and-coming area’ style lies being fed to them by unscrupulous local estate agents, will attest to.

Of course there is always the fun side of the site. The ‘hmmm… I really fancy that guy I met last night. He’s funny, intelligent, attractive, single, seemed to like me, and said that he’s looking to settle down and have children in the next two years or so. We have a mutual interest in bridge/extreme ironing/the UKIP (delete as…) and share a love of expensive chocolate. I think I have met my soulmate, my lobster. Now, all that’s left is to ensure that he has a fucking expensive house, and can afford to finance my online retail habit.’ Or the “My boss keeps saying ‘we’re a small, family-run business, we can’t afford to give you the pay rise you are asking for, you’re breaking my balls here!’, I’m going to see how just how much she spent on that six-bed-house-with-200-foot-garden she bought in Loughton this year”.

And to be honest, is there really a problem with that? Is it malicious and snoopy? Or is it ethically justifiable to want to know how much your mate spent on his new Victorian terrace in Stoke Newington, while saying that he can’t afford to go on holiday with you? To check on the bankability of potential future joint account holders? Well, if I am honest, it probably doesn’t sit very well with my ethical outlook, but that doesn’t stop the fact that it is fun to find out people’s financial secrets.

Of course the first thing we did was to enter our postcode, and find out that a property five doors away sold for just over £90k more in August last year, than we bought ours for six months before in February. So this afternoon found us wandering nonchalantly down the road, having decided just to see which one it was. This little excursion culminated in Blonde saying ‘I’ll keep look-out – you look through the letter box to see if they have also got wooden floors!’. Unfortunately they had those brushy things on the inside of their letter box, and I couldn’t even see whether they had used Farrow and Ball shades on the hallway walls. Killjoys! Anyhow. Since then, we have had one valuation and have two more booked.

I had better go. I have a date tonight. The friend I am meeting doesn’t realise that it is a date – he thinks we are meeting for a convivial glass of wine. But I’ve just seen what three-doors-down from him sold for last year, and I think I had better try and brush out this dreadlock before I meet him.

I am getting very bored of being off work, but whilst the amount of time I have spent in bed has led to such other negative side effects as the discovery today of the beginnings of a dreadlock in my hair, it has of course also meant that I have had time to get this blog going.

I am concerned that it has got to this time of night without me starting my entry, which is at least partially because various contacts have been online, and I am notoriously bad at containing my messenger habit. This is not helped by having my laptop in bed with me on a wireless connection which has been playing up for months but which I finally seem to have sorted out with some help from a friend last week, and with a phone call to VAIO-link today. The woman I spoke to was, by the way, one of the most abrasive ‘technical support analysts’ I have ever dealt with. She wouldn’t accept that I had previously registered with them, and, wanting my serial number, wouldn’t allow me to read it off the underside of my computer, but insisted on talking me through the steps required to get into the BIOS, occasionally barking out questions about what was on my screen to check that I was following her. (Just so you know – I cheated and read it off the sticker. I had to follow her instructions, obviously, so she didn’t catch me out, but I got a great deal of satisfaction from wilfully disobeying at the last minute.)

Anyway, I digress… Today’s posting is about the other thing that has been keeping me occupied these last few days. Last weekend I discovered that I shared my love of Green and Black’s chocolate, Maya Gold, with my housemate, Bloke.

In fact, we both proclaimed it the best chocolate ever. We decided, however, that this was a very sweeping claim to make without substantiation. When I went into our local deli on Sunday to buy some comfort food, and made the delightfully fortuitous discovery that they stocked a very classy looking brand called L’artisan du chocolat, I realised that we could begin our experimentation in earnest.

To this end I bought two bars out of the great array of flavours they had in stock, as well as a control bar of Maya Gold. The first was a dark bar called Madagascar – ‘sharp, intense, with red fruits and citrus notes’, the second, Ecuador – a milk chocolate with a ‘creamy, intense vanilla and caramel bouquet with a hint of malt.’ With some difficulty, I managed not to finish them before Bloke and Blonde returned that afternoon. Our verdicts were that the Madagascar, which being a citrus and spice affair is the Maya Gold’s natural challenger, is, at only 64%, a very good dark chocolate, but that it didn’t quite stand up to the Green and Black’s. The others dismissed the Ecuador out of hand, although I, usually very snooty about milk chocolate, rather liked its vanilla notes, and felt that it was a precocious little bar which could definitely hold its own in the same circles as its more sophisticated, darker relatives.

Yesterday I had cause to pop out again to stock up on necessities such as sun dried tomato, chorizo and chick peas, bleu d’auvergne and Bath Olivers, and of course, free range eggs and organic farmhouse bread to make the boiled eggs and soldiers I always crave when I am ill (…memories of being in bed as a child with mum bringing them to me – the yolks runny, the toast buttered – before kissing me goodbye, trailing just a whiff of her Oil of Ulay moisturiser…). At the counter, the Black Cardamom caught my eye. ‘Our house blend infused with green and black cardamom pods. Spicy, fresh, with a hint of smokiness’. On finishing the bar this afternoon, Bloke and I agreed it was very, very good – perfectly spiced, and at 70%, a natural accompaniment to a cup of Guatemalan coffee (oh for the days when I could handle caffeine!) and a good game of Scrabble on a blustery afternoon.

I made a vital error, however, and didn’t buy a control bar. So while we conceded that the Black Cardamom falls slightly and disappointingly short of the reigning champion, we may have to re-test under more rigorous conditions. We realise we have a long way to go in our quest to find the world’s best bar of chocolate.

Blonde returned home early today. She has caught my sore throat and won’t be at work tomorrow, and she has agreed to help us in our challenge. I think I may need to address some of the less savoury results of my illness, though. When I told her about the baby dreadlock, she responded that there is no excuse for not having brushed my hair for the last week, and she is worried that I may develop bed sores next!