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For this week’s Listography we are creating a selection box of treats. We have been asked to pick and mix and share our favourite retro sweets.
Sweets make me think of England. As a young child I lived with my parents in Cyprus and as an older child in Germany. In these countries sweets were just not the same!! Every time my Grandparents visited us in our homes abroad they would come laden with penny sweets. They did not want us to be deprived of such wonders as flying saucers, sherbert dips, fruit salads and black jacks. I loved it when they came to stay bringing their multi coloured, sugar coated booty with them.
What I looked forward to even more than that though was returning home to England and visiting the corner shop where I could select certain treasures by myself. How wonderful it felt to walk to the shop, gipping my pennies to exhange for such wonders as gobstoppers and bons bons, toffees and chocs. I loved taking the small white paper bag and filling it to bursting with sticky, sugary delights. And such marvellous things sweets were, you could almost make a whole meal from shrimps and mushrooms and eggs. You could even buy sugary false teeth to eat them with, and a sherbert drink to be sipped through a liquorice straw. Pure heaven!
How I have so few fillings I will never know! As a child of the 70s and 80s the penny sweets were a highlight of my younger, so much more innocent days.
Here are my top 5 childhood sugar fixes:
Fizzy cola bottles and Kola Kubes
These would always be my first choice. I loved to suck all the sugar and fizz from them before beginning to chew.
Milk bottles
These I loved! Chewy milky treats!
White chocolate mice
How I used to love these. Little white chocolate rodents. Yum yum!
Liquorice wheels
I used to unravel these before sucking them up like spaghetti.
Candy peanuts and peanut brittle
More of my favourite naughty treats. So full of sugar, so bad bad bad for your teeth but good good good for your soul!
What a wonderful listography this is! I can actually taste each sweet as I write about them. My mouth is watering and I want to be 7 years old again, when making decisions and choices meant what sweet to eat and nothing more sinister or serious than that. Not a care in the world except perhaps tooth decay! Wonderful memories, the sweetest of reminisces!
Very recently when I think of sweets they immediately make me think of Stephen Fry. I have been listening to his autobiography on CD in the car and his voice is such a delight to listen to. He has such a wonderful way with words and a voice I could listen to forever, soothing and just a little naughty, or perhaps that’s just me!
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/entertainment/news/stephen-frys-sweet-tooth-15034087.html
http://www.comedy.co.uk/guide/tv/little_crackers/episodes/1/5/
If you have not yet read Stephen Fry’s The Fry Chronicles I can really recommend it as a great read. Perhaps you could grab a bag of your favourite sweets to suck and chew whilst you peruse the pages. If you need inspiration for which sweet treats to choose then hop on over to Kate Takes 5 and feast your eyes on the lists to be found there.
