Did I get your attention then? Actually, this is serious. I have friends who have just returned from a holiday in San Francisco. They were there at the same time as Nicky and I were in Cyprus. We bought them a bottle of Cyprus brandy and a bottle of the sort of concentrated lemon squash that you can't get in the UK, the two ingredients (in addition to soda water) that you need to make the national beverage of Cyprus, the Brandy Sour. They bought us the usual US tee-shirts with California emblazoned across the front (not bad this time, actually - much better than the awful grey "Orlando" ones they bought us on their last visit!) and, wait for it, two bars of what presumably passes over your end for "chocolate." The brand is Ghirardelli and the two "flavours" (a word I use advisedly) were milk chocolate and milk chocolate with caramel. We had the misfortune to eat half a bar each of the latter earlier on this evening. Well, we both feel ill. How can so much sugar be concentrated into such compact bars!! And where was the actual chocolate! It did, I admit, smell vaguely like chocolate upon peeling back the wrapper, but such hopes rapidly evaporated as soon as a morsel was inserted into the mouth. Now there was nought but sugar and plenty of it. It was the sugariest sugary thing to pass my lips since the sweet prince of the Kingdom of Syrup and Sugar and his wife Princess Honeypie declared that the world shall be to the exclusion of all other considerations an exceptionally sugary place.
I really must ask several things. Do any of you actually eat this stuff? If you do, is it because you've done something wrong and are being punished? Is this stuff heavily promoted by the dental profession in order to drum up business? Can you buy actual real chocolate your end? I fear for you all. I know how important the aquisition of chocolate and its subsequent consumption is to many Merkins (as indeed it is to me too!). But if this stuff is the epitome, the alpha-to-omega, the dog's danglies, then all I've got to say to you is no wonder you like invading foreign countries. You're clearly after their bloody chocolate!
