The coronavirus crisis has pushed up my consumption of confectionery.
To be blunt, in lockdown I am ploughing my way through more sweeties than at any time since I was a bairn.
Which got me thinking, as you do when you’re stuck in the house, about all the treats you grew up with – and how we survived some of them.
So, join me on my wee stroll down some of the sweet spots of childhood.
Lucky Tatties
The big question is, how did we survive these? Cinnamon-dusted chunks of granite hard toffee that could snap a baby tooth in two with one bite. As if that wasn’t hazard enough, the manufacturers decided to bake plastic “prizes” into the thing. Which was why they were lucky, I suppose. Or perhaps the luck part was not choking on a tiny plastic airplane. You still get them in all good sweet shops. Minus the booby-traps.
Sherbet Fountain
If this doesn’t evoke fond memories of trying to dust sherbet off your good school jumper after playtime, you weren’t doing it right. The paper-wrapped cardboard tube held a sugar-hit that would keep you buzzing long after you were back in the class. I used to try sooking up the sherbet through the hollow liquorice stick, but it always clogged up. Mainly because you weren’t supposed to do that, but dip it in instead and lick the sherbet off, until you had a soggy mess at the bottom of the tube before the paper gave way. Hence, the jumper dusting.
Gobstoppers
Particularly the “traffic light” versions that came in a cardboard box of three – red, yellow and green. See what they did there. However, the colour lasted for about 30 seconds in your mouth (you knew that by taking it out frequently to check). There was an art to making these last as long as possible, the trick being not to crunch at any point, but just keep going until you got to that nasty tasting wee seed thing in the middle.
Penny Dainties
No childhood was complete without the loss of a filling or three to one of these beauties, Rich, caramel-flavoured, massive and the stickiest substance known to man until the invention of superglue. Personally, I think this one was designed by dentists to keep them in business.
Bazooka Joe bubble gum
Just as an experiment, try explaining this one to your kids. It’s bubble gum that didn’t really bubble, but if you managed to make one it just burst all over your face. Cue frantic scraping. And it tasted out and out weird. Inside the wrapper was a massively unfunny and usually incomprehensible cartoon about Bazooka Joe and his Gang. Dennis the Menace it wasn’t. And they always had adverts for things like tiny transistor radios or x-ray glasses that no one in the world ever sent away for. What the…?
Spangles
Not any old Spangles mind. The fizzy cola flavoured ones. That didn’t actually taste like cola, but close enough to kid on. The main side effect of these was to leave the surface of your mouth more cratered than the moon, while opening up new and interesting fissures on your tongue. See also Kola Kubes.
Callard & Bowser Butterscotch
No child in the land ever bought these. They were only ever handed over by visiting elderly uncles, who would usually produce the distinctive box from the top pocket of a musty-smelling Tweed jacket (leather elbow patches naturally) and then offer one of the foil-wrapped sweets to urchin relatives as if it were some sort of sacrament.
Smarties
No, not the ones you get today with their boxes or flip-top hexagonal tubes. These came with the plastic lid with a letter embossed on it (were you supposed to keep them to make words?). You would scoof the Smarties, pop out the cardboard bottom then use the tube as a blow pipe… usually for chewed up paper. Or was that just my school. And I don’t care if it is an urban myth, the blue ones sent at least one kid in our class a bit doolally.
There you go, that’s some of my idle thoughts. No doubt as soon as I stop typing others will spring to mind too. How about you?
