Think back to the last time you bought a Toblerone. Maybe it was nearing Christmas, and in the rush of seasonal good cheer you forgot to get your Uncle Pete the slippers you buy him from M&S every year, so you stopped off at the garage on the way to his house, and picked up an antifreeze gift set and a giant bar of the stuff.

Toblerone gets more gappy, but its fans are not happy Read more

Or was it at the airport, on your way home from a week abroad, where, after failing to buy a bag of local sweets for the office, called something hilarious like Plopp, you settled for a few Toblerones from duty free instead?

Only now, you’d be leaving your uncle with a bar that would last until January, rather than March. And Bill from accounts will be passed over for his allotted chocolatey triangle, and probably Amy on the desk across from you, too. Toblerone bars have lost a few chunks because, the makers say, the cost of ingredients is rising, and this is what they have to do in order to maintain their trademark triangular form.

Bill and Amy and Uncle Pete haven’t done anything to deserve it, but they’re yet more casualties of the plunging pound and Brexit Britain.

Toblerone is just a bar of chocolate – but these small differences make the bigger ones seem more real

We should have known what was coming last month, when, of all things, Marmite became a focal point for the fact that 48% of British voters were really quite pissed off at the sweeping changes to their national identity that were happening because of an ill-advised and ill-informed referendum. When Marmite and Ben & Jerry’s ran low in branches of Tesco due to a price dispute with makers Unilever, it was as if all the doomsday rhetoric that remoaners insisted on spouting might be starting to come true. No yeasty spread for our toast? What have we done?

It’s easy to scoff at the fact that it takes food to act as a focal point for what is happening in this country, when there is so much that has been truly awful about this year, not least a lurch to the far right that has horrified people across the political spectrum. Child poverty, hate crime, the immediate retraction of a promise of extra NHS funding – all of these things should be more alarming than a slightly smaller chocolate bar, or a pricier snack. Even if that snack is a Pot Noodle, a fish finger sandwich, or a packet of Walkers crisps.

John Prescott (@johnprescott) Brexit just got real.

Via @markcjgreenwood #toblerone pic.twitter.com/VyFT7KGDvv

But all of these things have become part of a slow, heavy, ominous collective sigh that has summed up the past few months. Indeed, 2016 has been defined by a creeping sense of dread that all the progress humanity has made over the past few decades – centuries, if you’re feeling particularly doomy – might be about to unravel. The anxiety over what could happen in America on Wednesday, and by extension to the rest of the world, is almost too great to contemplate.

So in many ways, it’s little surprise that it takes something seemingly trivial to cut through the incessant bleakness. Toblerone is just a bar of chocolate, like Marmite is just a divisive topping for toast, but it takes these unusual disturbances in the domestic everyday to jolt us out of what has become an enormous, abstract feeling of doom. These small differences make all of the bigger differences seem so much more real, and like they’re actually happening.

And besides, even if you don’t like Toblerone, it’s impossible to escape the irony of the fact that the latest emblem of Brexit Britain is quite literally a widening of the gap.