101 YEARS OLD AND STILL INVESTING IN CHOCOLATE...

FLUCTUATIONS in the value of the pound sterling are an aspect of Brexit that has gained much attention but I have just made some startling discoveries that appear to have been missed by economists. I refer to the apparent collapse in the value of chocolate money.

Every year before Christmas our supermarkets stock bags of chocolate money containing a mixture of various denominations of foil-wrapped chocolate coins but my researches have revealed that the values of these coins have undergone dramatic changes in recent years.

Last year I purchased three bags of chocolate coins at Tesco, each one of which contained 48p of choco-money. They cost me a total of £2, which worked out at £1.44 in chocolate coins for £2 sterling, giving an exchange rate of 72 choc-pence to the pound.

This was the first time the chocolate pound had moved ahead of the pound sterling in the currency market, which I thought rather shocking. Only a few years before that, in 2013, I found that chocolate money was trading at £1.16 to the pound which was exactly the same as the euro, leading to strong suspicions that the Europeans were planning to boost the Belgian economy by switching all their money to chocolate coins. Fortunately the Swiss chocolate makers got wind of this dastardly scheme and flooded the currency market with Swiss chocolate coins which were of higher quality than the Belgian variety.

The result, we can now see, has been a total collapse in the chocolate money economy for only last week I bought an 80p bag of chocolate coins from Sainsbury’s and found that it contained £6.01 in chocolate money.

That works out at an exchange rate of £7.51 choco-coins to the pound sterling. This leaves chocolate money somewhere between the Finnish markka (6.70 to the pound) and the Turkish new lira (7.85 to the pound), though it is still significantly weaker than the Polish zloty, Saudi riyal, Malaysian ringgit and Brazilian real.

Anyone who had invested their sterling pounds in chocolate money last year would have lost more than 90 per cent of their investment. Many have lamented that since the Brexit referendum the pound has lost some 20 per cent of its value compared with the euro but this is nothing compared with the fall in the value of chocolate in the last year. One pound in chocolate money is now worth only 13.3p.

Examination of the denominations of the chocolate coins in the Sainsbury’s bag reveal how bad the situation has become. Not only are there no 50p, 20p or 1p coins but the 5p and 10p coins are exactly the same size and the £1 coins are the smallest of all and appear to be made out of exactly the same quality of chocolate as the coins of lower value.

Presumably this is all an attempt to save money at the chocolate mint (not to be confused with mint chocolate, of course), but it is bound to lead to a run on the large 2p chocolate coins and history tells us that runny chocolate is a hazard, unless drizzled over a cake or some such dessert.