A Quarter Pound of Your Finest Please

Remember buying sweets by the quarter pound or the half pound or maybe even one eighth of a pound if you had already spent most of your pocket money and the sweet shop keeper was nice?

Pear drops, satin pillows, pips, cough drops, mint imperials, rhubarb and custard and my all time favourite – cola cubes. 

I loved cola cubes; I would suck the sugar off the outside and then nip away at the corners until I hit the heavenly reward of gooey chewy stuff in the centre.  My mother still remembers one day in her kitchen after school when one of them took her filling clean out of her tooth.

I loved them so much in my teens that I actually wrote their name on my pencil case which was one of those geometry set tins that had been dropped, sat on and stepped on so many times over the years that I could barely fit one red and one blue pen in it by my last year at school.   I still have it somewhere.

I did write Kola Kubes in an attempt to be cool, but then I also believed at the time that metallic purple eyeliner worn with electric blue mascara was cool, so obviously I wasn’t an authority on the subject anywhere other than in my own head.  In fact I once frightened an elderly man at an ATM while rocking that look.  He looked at me in a nonchalant way, and then gasped grabbing at his chest while his eyes flared open.  Poor man.

There were a number of shops in my home town that sold sweets by weight in the eighties but they’re all gone now.  However, one particular supermarket chain has gone and brought some of them back.  The sweets that is, not the shops - that would be a logistical nightmare.  They probably brought them out years ago, but I’ve only recently started digging my way out of the mountain of everything baby that I was buried under 5 years ago.

To my utter joy they brought back my beloved cola cube – oh yes – its pre packaged and looks slightly smaller than I remembered, but its back.

I was so excited that I bought 2 packets the first time.  I didn’t offer any to my mother.  Instead, I became my mother.  It’s true; the very first one I chewed took my biggest filling right out of my tooth.  Feck it! 

Boy did it hurt, but I wasn’t sure what was worse, my raw exposed nerve ending or the possibility of never being able to have a cola cube again.  Now that I had it back there was no way I was letting it go again.

My dentist was not amused, his list of things I shouldn’t be eating and drinking in order to preserve my teeth has been getting steadily longer since we first met and he seduced me into his practice with his 4 D x-ray machine thingy.  Just to be clear, that’s not a euphemism for anything, it is a very nifty x-ray. 

No more muesli, granary bread, sticky sweets, fizzy drinks, caramel, candy floss and sherbet fruits but the cola cube was a treat too far.  I swear if he attempts to add red wine to that list, he better start sleeping with one eye open, because the gloves will be coming off.

On the bright side, I have been successful in my quest to learn to suck the cola cube without biting.  It’s been a chore, but some things are just too good to live without.