Some of the things that make happiest in life are small and inexpensive pleasures carried forward from and reminiscent of childhood. Such as a bag of sweets.
The very names are often enough to trigger delight: black jacks, sherbet pips, kola cubes, love hearts, lemon bonbons, strawberry bonbons, pear drops, glacier mints, jelly tots, wine gums, humbugs ... the list is a long and delirious one of lip-smacking, gob-stopping wonder.
Heaven, it seems, is sugar-rich and full of artificial colours.
But these days, having succumbed to middle-age, I must almost shamefully confess that my confectionery of choice happens to be a very smooth aniseed-flavoured cough drop invented by a French physician in 1949 and still made to his original secret recipe at a factory in Portugal.
Recommended by pharmacists the world over, Dr Bayard's cough drops are more than just medicinal wonders; they are also - like Ferrero Rocher - a welcome addition to any social occasion. Or so we are told by the manufacturers in their rather charming attempt at English: "Even in a friends gathering they're always a success!"
If they lack the anarchic and childlike character of the best of British sweets and trade instead on grown-up bourgeois credentials, they remain eccentric enough in a European manner to make one smile and delicious enough to ensure I keep sucking them. I do worry though that I'm on a slippery slope towards Werther's Originals.
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