What’s Your Poison?

The traditional image of a writer is someone fuelled by opium – Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, or alcohol – Dylan Thomas, Ernest Hemingway, or tobacco – Oscar Wilde, Beryl Bainbridge…

Such grown-up addictions! Mine, I have to confess is far more childish – it’s sugar.

I’m prompted to own up to this having watched Nigel Slater’s programme Life is Sweets. (Last Monday BBC4) If you didn’t see it, he explored the emotional resonance of sweets in relation to his childhood; he also touched on the history of confectionery and there were some entertaining examples of old tv adverts for sweets.

It brought back memories for me: of going to Thompson’s sweet shop after school with a threepenny bit to spend – that’s three old pence – and dithering for ages between a Lucky Bag or a Palm toffee bar (a thin toffee bar with a yellow strip of banana through the middle) or liquorice bootlaces. I remember dreaming of the day when I’d have sixpence (ie 2 ½ p) and be able to buy a whole bar of Cadbury’s chocolate…

Obviously this early immersion created a habit I now find impossible to kick especially when I’m stuck at my desk, writing or more often not-writing. Quite honestly I like everything but my staple flavours of choice are mint – glaciers mints and butter mintoes – and aniseed – Black Jacks and aniseed balls, but they’ve got to be the right sort – the old-fashioned ones with the seed in the centre. With the odd foray into lemony sherbet for a real kick….

I felt ashamed of the childishness of my craving until I discovered that Jack London, that apparently ‘tough guy’, felt the same: “All the time I was striving to be a man amongst men and all the time I nursed a secret and shameful desire for candy.”

So that’s all right then. Pass the pear drops…