Rio’s choc-ice

I shall be ringing the Crown Prosecution Service later today to insist that they bring a prosecution against the footballer Rio Ferdinand for having concurred with a tweeted suggestion that his colleague Ashley Cole was a ‘choc ice’. The term is deeply racist and offensive, given to mean that the person is black on the outside and white on the inside. Similar terms are, I believe, Oreo and coconut. Rio, perhaps realizing his transgression, has since insisted that he meant that Ashley was a ‘fake’; but I think we should let the courts decide that one, shouldn’t we?

I can’t see any semantic link between choc ice and fake, unless Rio was referring to the sort of choc ices one used to buy in the 1970s and which were covered not in chocolate, but in ‘chocolate flavoured coating’ — ie not chocolate really (as defined by the then relevant trading standards regulations) because it did not consist of a high enough percentage of cocoa butter. The sort of chocolate which used to be called, in the German manner, ersatz, and which for a long while formed the coating on other such comestibles as Jacob Club Biscuits and, if I recall, Penguins. Some cheap children’s sweets were made of this stuff, too, such as those penny ‘chocolate’ mice; you could tell it wasn’t proper chocolate because of the rather slimy, smoky deposit left on the roof of your mouth.

But I digress: it is hard to believe that this is what Rio meant — I think it’s for the magistrate to decide. We need another case where the beak is forced to write 5,240 words of unintentionally hilarious, utter bleeding rubbish before coming to the conclusion that Rio is innocent because such things, in truth, are not in the dominion of criminal law, unless you live in a dictatorship.