SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

This French documentary left me awe-struck, and a nation’s self-serving myths in ruins

thing, which seems sensible, but this fellow from Swindon not only found a bar, he found three “fingers” in the packet instead of two. Not in a broken sense. In an extra sense.

I won’t tell you the chap’s name, because I’m going to rant about a dreadful thing I think he did but he seems like a nice man. He’s smiley. He founded a charity. So let’s not savage him by name.

The story of his three-fingered orange discovery was reported in several national newspapers. (What can I tell you? They’re desperate for anything that isn’t Brexit.) Each version of the story speculated on whether the man was going to sell this rare artefact – this excessively-fingered, citrus-flavoured thing – and each reported that, no, he was going to give it to his daughter.

Lovely! No profit motive here. Just kindness and generosity. Just the loving gift of chocolate from a man to his daughter!

His eight-month-old daughter. “She likes sucking on chocolate,” the Swindon man explained.

God in heaven! An eight-monthold? Those little creatures that can’t walk or talk and are just beginning to grow teeth? The ones that have recently started on solid food, wide-eyed as they taste mashed potato and baby rice? Who still need lots of milk and can’t be given whole blueberries in case they choke? Sucking on a Cadbury’s Twirl like a dummy?

To me this is much more amazing than finding three chocolate fingers in the packet. He could have found three human fingers and I’d be less shocked.

Yet none of the papers remarked on this at all. They threw in the domestic titbit as though it were totally normal, in the era of mass childhood obesity and rotten teeth and spiking type 2 diabetes, to shove a hunk of chocolate between a baby’s boneless gums as a comforter. There was nary a suggestion for the casual reader that a dentist or doctor might recommend otherwise.

And that’s why you don’t need to know the man’s name, because it’s not him. It’s us. We have gone quite mad. We’re weaning our children on to sugar like the Elizabethans gave them beer. There’s sugar in the

All-Bran. There’s sugar in the bread. Bottles of syrupy pasta sauce are presented as normal, while the ones that taste normal are labelled “NO ADDED SUGAR” like some weird kook’s medical product.

I was thinking about all this while watching Junior Bake Off, which came to an end last night on Channel Four after three intense weeks of childish enthusiasm. And that was just mine.

My favourite contestant was Sam, nine, who went out on biscuit day. I thought it was a bit unfair to make Sam compete against 15-year-olds. This was a fellow who clutched his toy wolf nervously as he awaited the results, mopping

‘The judges said there was too much icing,’ said Sam, nine, ‘but there’s no such thing’