Chocolate, as Karl Marx famously put it, "is the sugar of a bitter world, the soul of soulless conditions, the teabreak of the people". And Lenin, reacting furiously to the invention of the Cadbury's dairy milk chocolate bar in 1905, denounced it as a capitalist plot: "It affects your nerves; you want to say nice, stupid things and stroke the heads of people who could create such scrumptiousness while living in this vile hell."
OK, I may not have remembered perfectly. But they had a point. Fed up with the fight for world justice? Dazed and confused by the Third Way? There is only one everyday, affordable answer: stuff your face with chocolate. But which kind? There is a huge industry trying to persuade you that the best is something to be measured by the amount of cocoa per kilo of fat and that it is made by the Swiss. Native lack of confidence has led many people to swallow this whole.
A bad mistake: intense, prolonged testing by the Ashley household has definitely proved that when it comes to chocolate at least, price and hype have little to do with the buzz we all need. Lindt's Excellence range has an underlying nauseous quality; Suchard's Milka is fine with nuts in but very boring without. The top-price Nestle bars are too sticky on the teeth and not chocolately enough; Hershey bars are, this family believes, simply foul. Mr Wonka refused to return our calls. We have tried many other brands but can now reveal that for that perfect moment in a vile world, there is only one truly sophisticated choice. It comes in a purple wrapper, it is 94 years old, and it is made in romantic, cowbell-echoing Birmingham. About chocolate at least, Lenin was right.
