Easter chocolate ain’t what it used to be – could a Yorkie truck ride again?

Almost every Christmas as a kid, I would get ill. Not terribly; but enough to feel that life was a bit unfair. I loved Christmas and looked forward to it intensely, so when the sore throat kicked in, on or around December 23, my heart would feel pained at the injustice of it all.

Easter, by contrast, seemed to steal up out of nowhere, often coming at the end of a short term. There wasn’t really much time to build the anticipation; and anyway, we’d only be getting an Easter egg or two - nice, but without the element of surprise or jeopardy that existed with Christmas presents.

Most years we’d go to my grandparents’ place, which I loved. Seeing them was joyful in and of itself, and with spring usually showing its face by then, the whole getaway seemed always to be full of hope. I suppose I might have been channeling the resurrection story subconsciously, although the religious element of Easter was much less pronounced at Nana and Grandad’s house than at our own. As a seven-year-old, that suited me down to the ground.

Best of all, we always got good treats: chocolate eggs naturally, but also other delectable sweet morsels, and often a couple of packets of football stickers too. They weren’t exactly Eastery, but my grandmother liked the beautiful game and seemed to approve of the pleasure offered by Panini. I sometimes wonder whether she saw them as a gateway to the football pools, which she played unfailingly, and for the most part unsuccessfully, for much of her adult life.

The thing that came to epitomise those Easters in Dorset was the Yorkie Egg. In the days when Yorkie was very much the chocolate preserve of truckers, it was a marketing moment of genius to package the egg in a box designed to look like a lorry. The first time I was given one, I thought it was the greatest confectionery I’d ever seen.

The fact it came with some loose chunks of a Yorkie bar actually inside the egg was also perfect. Nowadays, it is more or less de rigueur to include a bar or two of the applicable chocolate inside the Easter egg’s box, but not inside the egg itself. It shows a lack of effort if you ask me. I bet Jesus wouldn’t approve.

What’s more, Yorkie appears to have long moved on from their egg-in-a-truck gimmick, which is frankly inexcusable. It’s rather like a Bible update that has Chris coming into Jerusalem on a jet ski, or simply being there all along. Plain wrong.

This is a particular shame because the Easter egg market as a whole feels more sensible now than it has done for some years. It might be a consequence of the present cost of living crisis, although I think the foundations may have been laid during the 2008 financial crash.

In the boom years prior to that, eggs at Easter had grown bigger and grander and ever more extravagant. In shop windows you’d see vast chocolate shells, festooned with messages written in liquid chocolate of many sorts, usually swaddled in plastic and ribbons. They were the kind of monstrosities that would have had Jesus spinning in his grave, if he hadn’t just risen from it.

Those really grand eggs have largely made way to simpler fare. Big’uns are still to be found, but a nice, straightforward Cadbury’s Caramel egg will do very nicely – assuming a Yorkie truck really can’t be unearthed.

Having ditched chocolate for Lent, I’m looking forward to a nibble or two on Easter morning, but my sugar addiction has abated to such a degree that a small egg is probably all I could manage anyway. My children think I’m mad.

They are also slightly narked off that they won’t be seeing their own grandparents this year, and so there is no mini Easter egg hunt in store for them. On the other hand, since we won’t be at home, they won’t be cajoled to church: a sadness to me, but major relief to them.

I just hope the eggs we’ve got them are met with approval. If they are not, I will instruct them to build a lorry from cardboard, fill it with their eggs and truck it over to me. After all, if they won’t be satisfied with their own childhood, they might just as well help to recreate mine.