Too dark to bear!

“My wife bought dark chocolate by mistake and offered it to me,” writes a Craigie regular. “I prefer milk chocolate, but, as the family dustbin, I’ll give anything a try.

“Most of the other teenagers on the Dundee-Orleans exchange in 1948 would not eat French food and wanted fish and chips and mince and tatties. On an overnight stay in Paris, I ate all my steak, plus the helpings of at least two other pupils. They had just discovered it was horsemeat. I thought it lovely.

“But this plain chocolate was something even I could not stomach. One taste and I went off to the kitchen to spit it out. Of the many ingredients, that bar of chocolate contained 95% cocoa, only 1% sugar and the same percentage of salt!

“It was made in Germany, was suitable for vegetarians and carried the Fairtrade label.

“If some Germans like that kind of chocolate, it’s no wonder they went to war so often! Like kilted Highlanders who were said to have been made aggressive by midges and prickly heather, perhaps that chocolate had the same effect.

“My mother had strange tastes in chocolate. She loved plain chocolate, boxes of Black Magic and chocolate gingers. I could just manage these, but this dark chocolate was in a class of its own. Mum used to give us cascara when syrup of figs wasn’t doing the trick – this bar of chocolate tasted as bad.

“Is this Angela Merkel’s way of punishing us for voting to leave the EU?”