Sweet memories… 24.09.09
I GUESS it’s a sign that I
really am getting old. You know, when I start thinking
back to when I was younger and believing in my own head
how much things have changed.
I found myself doing that during the week. Thankfully
though I wasn’t telling my girls that I had walked to
school in my bare feet with sods of turf under my arm or
anything like that.
I was thinking about sweets.
You see when I was growing up there was a fantastic
sweet shop in our town. The kind of sweet shop you only
ever see now in films.
This was a shop where the sweets for the most part were
displayed in large glass jars and where you could spend
at least ten minutes wondering which ones you wanted.
There was a minimum amount however that you could buy
from the glass jars. |
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You could, if you had the
money, buy a quarter of any of the sweets on display but
most of the time I think people (well, definitely me)
spent only the minimum and got perhaps ten pence worth.
Thinking back now it was brilliant that you could get
just ten pence worth of any of the sweets and I reckon
the man who owned the shop must have had great patience
waiting for customers to decide on what they wanted.
But then again, there was so much to choose from and we
couldn’t afford the kind of wholesale purchases you see
these days at those pick and mix places - so we had to
take our time and choose carefully.
As I tried to recall the many kinds of sweets on
display, I’ve come to the conclusion now that some of
the sweets were downright dangerous.
Take Cola Cubes for instance.
Now, I loved Cola Cubes. In fact, I’d say they would
still rank up there with my all time favourites. But
let’s face it, a cube was a dangerous enough kind of a
shape to ever accidentally swallow.
Thankfully they weren’t the ones that usually slid
accidentally down your throat, but there were a few that
did.
Funnily enough I always found those glacier mints
extremely slippery.
And then of course there were other dangers. Like eating
in class. I’m pretty sure at the time we thought we were
being extremely crafty when we’d splutter out a pretend
cough and use the chance of putting our hand to our
mouth to drop in a sweet.
But we must have thought our teachers stupid altogether.
I mean I’m pretty sure I could smell a cola cube now at
ten paces so I’m guessing in hindsight that we weren’t
really pulling the wool over the eyes of our teachers
after all.
We did live dangerously though in other ways. For
instance we ate those red and yellow sweets with the
sherbet in the centre.
And yes, they were beautiful, but when you had sucked
them to the point that the sherbet kicked in, the hard
shell was sometimes as sharp as a piece of glass. And
I’ve always felt that eating glass was probably quite
dangerous.
Still, if you didn’t want to eat glass or chance getting
choked with a cube there were still some great choices.
There were those sour apple sweets, there were yellow,
pink and white bon bons, those black cough drops and
aniseed drops, ritchie mints, midget gems, brandy balls,
bulls-eyes and if you had money - those pink and white
caramels. And that’s only a few of the ones I can
remember.
What was even better was if you didn’t have ten pence to
buy them, you could still get sweets for five pence or
two pence or even a penny.
Things like black jacks, or those wee white chewing gums
like golf balls. |
Some of the names were
brilliant. There were stinger bars and refreshers and
love hearts and all sorts of nice or cool names that
made you truly believe that what you were eating was
probably not as bad for you as grown ups would have you
believe.
And of course, you could always point if they kept
harping at you that all you’d eaten anyway was a fruit
salad!
But by and large you just ignored them. I mean what did
they know anyway.
They just kept thinking back to when they were young and
saying that things were better then… |
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A DROP OF
PORTER is
the weekly
column of
Inishowen
Independent
editor,
Liam Porter. |
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