Sweets for my sweet tooth

THE YEAR BEGINS anew. The ‘10 becomes ‘11. Noughties turn into – what, teenies? Our better halves proclaim diets for all and slap a prohibition on the Mr Porky’s even as we’re bitterly sucking the last few orange creams. As she spends most of her spare time not conducting an affair but training in the gym, presumably for an affair, it is reasonable to assume that the diet is a hint in my direction.

Thereafter, as I sift through shopping bags turfing aside Alpro yoghurts and bulgur wheat in search of Msr. Kipling’s finest, I’m want to ponder the subject of addiction. We all know it’s a powerful thing, but it’s a real kicker when the fix you need no longer exists.

It’s a sure sign of age when the sweets you enjoyed as a child/adolescent/student are no longer in production. Where are the Golden Cups? the Bursting Bugs? the fabled Winner Tacos? Come on, old man Rowntree, cut me some slack here. Another sign of age is swearing that new and old sweets that are available don’t taste ‘like they used to’. Never, I’m quite sure, has anyone uttering these words considered that their tastes might have changed, both through the physical degradation of the taste buds and the diminishing psychological drive to devour half a Milka – a large Milka – before dinner.

But that’s addiction for you; you have to keep at least trying the sweets or how will you know what they don’t taste like anymore? Some of us go to extreme lengths to indulge a waning sweet tooth: some of us actually import all kinds of things from the other side of the Atlantic ocean just to have a bowl of Fruit Loops and a significant other who can tell her friends that we refuse to grow up.