As a conspicuous confectionery consumer, Under The Counter was outraged to discover that a man has donated a dozen 20-year-old Chocolate Oranges to a museum.
Ian Bradshaw was gifted the haul when Kraft Foods shut the Terry’s factory in York and switched production to France, making him redundant.
UTC would have preferred a week’s pay for every year he’d been employed, but hey ho.
It gets worse. The Chocolate Oranges were originally bound for Australia, before an order was cancelled. They were then foisted onto the factory’s 300 staff to sweeten the bitter taste of being chewed up and spat out by remorseless global capitalism.
The closure brought the curtain down on nearly 250 years of Terry’s confectionery production in York, where it had been making sweeties since 1767. It goes without saying that readers, especially paid-up Fed members, will know this was the year that Norway’s oldest newspaper still in print, Adresseavisen, published its first edition. Sticking with the newstrade theme, it was also when The Auld Boy made his debut as a paper boy.
Commenting on his decision to squirrel away rather than scoff the now-foosty foodstuffs, Bradshaw said: “It felt right to preserve them to help tell the Terry’s story to future generations.”
Except he didn’t preserve them. They were left to slowly bloom, crack and crumble, instead of serving their true purpose. Namely, bringing joy to chocaholics – not informing the weans of tomorrow.
As UTC wistfully concluded: “A chocolate in the mooth is worth 12 in a museum.”
