Regular readers will know that I am not afraid to tackle the big subjects on this blog.
Politics, classical music, literature, food, ecology, social networking, technology...the list goes on. You name it, it’s probably been subjected to my ill-informed and unthinking scrutiny.
But I realised the other day that I have been remiss. There is one burning issue that remains undiscussed here.
Reader, I apologise.
All I can do is rectify the situation without further ado.
It started with an innocent tweet in my timeline.
The mere mention of the word ‘curly’ in conjunction with its natural rhyming partner was enough to send me down memory lane. I don’t know why, but some sweets belong firmly in my childhood. It’s almost as if they stopped making them in 1979. And even though the taste of curly-wurlys (wurlies?) eaten in my innocent youth remains with me still, I would no more buy one now than Sarah Palin would conjugate a prefixed imperfective verb of motion in Russian.
Or English, come to that.
Why is this?
They are still making them, those cheeky monkeys who call themselves Cadbury UK. They’ve been making them since 1971.
So why did I stop eating them about seven years later?
It’s got nothing to do with ‘growing up’, a pernicious process that I have managed to avoid with dextrous ease for forty-five years now. Oh no, I still eat confectionery on a quasi-daily basis: Mars, Twix, Wispa (plain or Gold), Crunchie, Kit-Kat (don’t get me started - just bring back the foil), Flake, Maltesers and on and on and on. I eat them all with a childish relish that makes my five-year-old boy’s innocent pleasure at the sight of a party pack of chocolate buttons seem debonair and sophisticated.
(Obviously I don’t let him have chocolate very often. Bad for your teeth, you know. Now pass me that King Size Twix.)
It’s just one of those mysteries of life, I suppose. I may have to try one soon, just to see what I’ve been missing.
Now, time for some interactivity. What I’m about to do will no doubt please some people, while enraging and alienating others. (I have already discovered, to my cost, the folly of extolling the virtues of cre*e e*gs in certain quarters.)
The fact is, people take their confectionery very seriously. Yet impassioned debate is entirely missing from the public forum. National news outlets, obviously, have to shy away from any accusations of product placement, which is why Charlie Brooker never writes his 800 words on ‘Why I Hate Lion Bars’.
Food bloggers, by contrast, probably could write about individual candy bars or brands, but are too busy doing vertical comparisons of single-estate Argan oils or writing impassioned and purple prose on the subject of their favourite root vegetable.
So to fill this gap I present below a vaguely categorised list of chocolate-based confections (there is one exception, but I couldn’t leave out Caramac, could I?). It is an entirely personal list - so even though you may disagree with me I will come down like a ton of bricks on anyone who says I’m ‘wrong’ or ‘deluded’ or ‘in league with Satan’. But I give it to you in the hope that you, in return, will embellish it with vigorous and informed debate.
As long as you don’t diss my creme eggs.
The Classics - Timeless, irreplaceable
Twix
Kit-kat
Toffee Crisp
Mars
Crunchie
Flake
Great When I Was Ten, But Inexplicably Don’t Eat Them Any More
Curly Wurly
Rolo
Caramac
Good Solid Stuff, But No More Than Once A Month For Some Reason
Minstrels
Galaxy
Aero
‘Modern’ Pretenders, And Pretty Darned Good Ones At That
Yorkie
Wispa
Wispa Gold
Dime
Down In One
Smarties
Maltesers
Buttons
Not As Big As You Want Them To Be, But Any Bigger And You Would Probably Feel A Bit Sick
Milky Way
Milky Bar
(Finger of) Fudge
Creme Egg
Ripple
‘Grown-Up’ Chocolates That You Just Wanted To Cram In Your Mouth But Were Only Allowed One At A Time
After Eight
Matchmakers
Passed For Sophisticated In The Seventies But We All Know Better Now
Bournville
Nice Try But We’re Not Falling For Healthy Stuff In Our Chocolate
Fruit ’N Nut
and especially
Whole Nut
Always Somehow Disappointing
Revels
Club
Penguin
Just Somehow Never Fancied Them, You Know. Perfectly Nice, I’m Sure, But...
Topic
Picnic
Boost
Twirl
Time Out
Double Decker
Can’t Imagine Why Anyone Would Want To Eat Them
Lion Bar
Drifter
Sorry, Repulsive
Walnut Whip
Wagon Wheels
Bounty
Marathon (and no I will not call them Sn*ck*rs even though that’s been the name for at least thirty years)