Seasonal Creep and Chocolate Turds

A light-hearted post in this swamp of American analysys today.

January the 10th. The mince pies have barely decomposed, the last tinsel is still lurking in a drawer, and Marks & Spencer has already moved on. Not tentatively. Not shyly. Full Easter frontage. Eggs everywhere. Rabbits multiplying. Spring apparently imminent, if not meteorologically then at least in the confectionery imagination.

Easter this year is early April. That gives us a clear three months in which chocolate eggs are expected to loiter on shelves, slowly acquiring a fine patina of consumer indifference. By March, nobody will want them. By April, nobody will remember why they are there. The calendar has been flattened into a single continuous retail season, punctuated only by mild panic and price stickers.

This is not celebration. It is exhaustion. Ritual works because it is bounded. Christmas feels special precisely because it ends. Easter is supposed to arrive with daffodils and a bit of light after winter. Instead it now crashes into January like an uninvited guest, tracking mud across the carpet and demanding attention while everyone is still hungover and broke.

And then there is the chocolate.

Front and centre, a thing shaped like either a slug or a small but determined turd, reclining coquettishly against a background of hearts. The caption reads “You tickle my pickle.” This is sold as food. In a family supermarket. In daylight. The euphemism is not even subtle. It is the linguistic equivalent of nudging someone in the ribs and raising an eyebrow until your face cramps.

To be fair, this particular item is probably aimed less at Easter than at Valentine’s Day. That does not really help. If anything, it makes it worse. Valentine’s used to be about flowers, cards, and mild embarrassment. Now it appears to involve gifting your partner a chocolate stool and hoping irony does the heavy lifting.

The whole thing feels less like wit and more like a rejected prop from a late era Benny Hill sketch. All it needs is Yakety Sax playing faintly in the background and someone chasing it round the aisle with a knowing grin. Not naughty enough to be genuinely subversive, not clever enough to be funny. Just innuendo on autopilot, endlessly recycled until it becomes visual noise.

One imagines the meeting where this was approved. A room full of people nodding sagely about “cheeky British humour” while carefully avoiding the obvious question of whether a nation that needs chocolate shaped like excrement to express affection might be in mild cultural decline. I did think it was probably aimed at Farage supporters, but they're highly unlikely to shop in M&S.

It is not offensive so much as weary. A forced naughtiness. A desperate attempt to inject banter into a product category that once relied on novelty, timing, and restraint. Instead we get Benny Hill humour without the charm, Valentine’s without the romance, Easter without the spring, and chocolate turds whispering smut at us from the shelves in January.

Seasonal creep is bad enough. But when it brings with it slapstick innuendo and confectionery lavatorialism months early, something has gone wrong. Not morally. Just aesthetically. And once aesthetics go, the rest usually follows.