Earlier today a colleague of mine (let us call him ‘Mr. Chris “the haircut” MacDonald’) made the statement,

‘There is not enough affordable white chocolate’.

It seems he was inspired to make this assertion on the basis that he had journeyed to the local newsagents/mini-market, and had found them to sell no other variety of white chocolate but Milky bars, which are, in his own words, ‘really thin and unsatisfying, and too expensive’.
More importantly, another colleague (let us call him ‘Mr. “Randy” Andy Wimbush’) rejoined by opining that he

‘Hate[s] white chocolate’.

And thus was a debate on the merits of the three main varieties of chocolate initiated. These are:

• White chocolate
• Dark chocolate
• Milk chocolate or similar

Mr. MacDonald pointed out that Mr. Wimbush was basing his evaluation of White Chocolate as a phenomenon entirely on his experience of the aforesaid ‘Milky bars’, and that Mr. MacDonald had himself already labelled this brand as ‘a bollocks example’ of what he considered to be the general standard of White Chocolate.
Another gentleman present, being myself (let us call him ‘Mr. M.P.A. Foster-Poole’), ridiculed Mr. MacDonald’s taste for White Chocolate with the phrase ‘White chocolate is for pussies; dark chocolate is a MAN’S choice’.

Mr. MacDonald and Mr. Wimbush then joined forces to express disgust in this blatantly superior variety (obviously they hadn’t a very highly developed sense of taste), and Mr… erm I held them off for a while with appropriate comments regarding their lack of taste, until the more senior owner of the room (let us call him ‘Mr. Peter “big bad Carpo the geezer” Carpenter) calmly announced that he fav
oured

‘Normal chocolate’

Though this silenced the room somewhat, due to our lack of motivation to get on the wrong side of the big man, your hero (Mr. M.P.A. Foster-Poole) eventually plucked up the nerve to express the opinion that this made Mr. Carpenter a

‘boring woolly liberal’

I am still alive.

Somehow.

I further proposed that dark chocolate was a glamorous left-wing foodstuff, whilst white chocolate was ‘for evil anally-retentive right-wing facists’. I am sure Che Guevara at some point sat down to a meal of bitterest dark chocolate and most acerbic lemons, and equally certain that Hitler would have revelled in the white Aryan ‘superiority’ of what he undoubtedly labelled the ‘meistershokolade’.

Whilst the room was still overcome by my astonishing, entirely original thesis, a solitary, previously-unheard voice spoke out at last:

‘You know what’s really nice? That Milka French stuff.’

That, ladies and gentlemen, comes under the category of ‘or similar’.