Sweets, no not the thing you have after mains, that's a pudding, sweets as in chocolate, sugary chewy things, lollipops, gums, licky things, all those lovely naughty things we couldn't get enough of when we were kids and now tell children are bad for you.
So what are sweets? Well, I guess it's anything that's not really healthy that you really enjoy eating and buy from the sweet shop, supermarket, tuck shop, newsagents, petrol station, and anywhere else they on offer. Fruit does not count as sweets, despite what these modern-day mum's tell their kids, neither does a carrot or a bag of crisps or a biscuit or a wafer and certainly not a bread roll or a breadstick. Sweets are naughty-paughty by definition and sticky, melty, eye-watering sweet, or eye-watering sour, they come in bags or really bright wrappers and you can stick them in your pocket or your bag without too much fear of them going bad - yes they are almost immortal in shelf life terms. Sweets are full of delicious preservatives, tasty 'e's, and fake fruit flavours made in a laboratory - YUM YUM! Even a chocolate-coated stick of celery isn't a sweet. The chocolate, yes, but the celery must go straight in the bin by order of the Sweet Man (or the Candy Man as the call him in the US and he can, oh yes he can).
In America sweets are called candy (although that's a dog's or a loose lady's name to my mind). I have no idea why it's called candy because I've never been into a candy shop or along a candy aisle in the supermarket, but I have spent many happy, drooling hours in sweet shops or wandering up and down the sweet aisle with my sweaty sixpence in my hand when I was a boy. I remember when sweets came in big glass jars and you could but a penny's worth which was handed to you in a white paper bag. Shelf after shelf of heaven, blackjacks, fruit salads, shrimps, aniseed balls, gobstoppers, penny lollies, flying saucers, boiled sweets, pineapple cubes, chewy bananas, pastilles, well, I guess you can think of a few of your own. My favourites were liquorice torpedoes, they still are really. The chocolate bars were usually on the counter in a display case in nice neat tempting lines. My favourites were Turkish Delight and Crunchies, but any choccy bar would do just fine (Inca, Aztec, Phoenician - no, I made that last one up) as long as it wasn't a Bounty bar. Bounty was not my idea of paradise, I don't think they were worth the search.
Bubblegum (POP!) is a sweet, but not chewing gum, at least it isn't to me. Chewing gum is more than that. Chewing gum is a rite of passage from little boy, to slightly bigger boy. If you were allowed chewing gum you knew that you were on the pathway to cigarettes (tobacco ones, not those white sugar ones with painted red tips that came in little cigarette packets). You weren't going to choke on it, swallow it so that it could clog your stomach (well, not too often anyway) and, so long as you disposed of it properly (like sticking it behind a stranger's car door handle) it was slappily - usually open-mouthed chewingly - acceptable.
In summer it was all iced lol's, ice pops, and those weird pyramidical things that came in waxed paper and always went soggy after about five minutes when you sucked on them. I never quite accepted ice cream as a sweet and certainly not ice cream lollies, the thought of a Cornish Mivvy still sets my teeth on edge. Ice cream is pudding and a milky ice lolly is a crime against St Macarius (aka St Macaroon) the patron saint of sweets. Macarius was born in Alexandria in the early 300s and was a merchant selling sweets, candies, fruits and pastries. So, Saint Sweet Seller really, the original Catholic Candy Man.
Chew this over (see what I did there) and tell me about your favourite sweets. Happy chomping!
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