Sweets for my Sweet, Sugar for my Honey...

It’s funny: as a child I envied Karin, a classmate with whom I often walked back from school home, because she always had money to buy sweets at the kiosk. Karin’s parents had a drugstore, but no time.

Karin bought soda-sweets, and little eatable sponge rubber dolls that held hand endlessly like those garlands you cut out from tissue paper; she bought Salinos; Ahoy!-effervescent powder-sachets with a blue sailor on the waxen paper, that grew so strangely limp when you licked the last few small crumbs out of the edge with your tongue. Pipes from liquorice with a pink or lime green foamy filling on top, that stuck in form of a cone in the pipe bowl and had to be unhinged in one piece by a skilfully bite of the molars; rolled-up liquorice- ribbons that you held with your teeth and reeled off to your waist, and then gobbled up with lightning speed. And sticky toffees, which sometimes pulled out a filling from the tooth (Karin had a lot of fillings, it was a time when the dentist gave you sweets as a recompense for the suffered torture).

My parents disapproved of Karin, who was the first in our class to wear nylon stockings, and they disapproved of sweets before dinner – as a quite well-behaved child I abided them, mostly.

In the drugstore Meissner stood huge cans, filled to their neck with salmine pastilles (tiny rhombes of very salty liquorice) – a cockaigne, into which Mr. Meissner dipped a tea spoon and laddled the boot into a pointed little paper bag – Mr. Meissner was a friend of children and sold a teaspoon of salmine pastilles for two pennys. You sticked them in form of a star with saliva onto the back of your hand, and licked them off till they became wafer-thin. Then there were sweets that one could never suck to their end: nibble-thaler had to be bitten through till the cracknel splintered among the teeth; gobstoppers hid under their hard vanilla or powder pink shell a tiny sugar kernel and must be bitten through, and cristal raspberry sweets did not only colour your tongue excitingly red but also cut your mouth with glassy needles. Round went the horrible rumour that genuine liquorice sticks were made out of real ox blood. Highly interesting were the very personal mixtures that one created oneself: „chocolate&salmine pastilles& tiniest sugarywhite peppermint pastilles“: aaah! Even better: “chocolate, sour raspberry sweets and salmine pastilles“ – that was heaven!

Today I have the money to buy all these treasures – I could put rows of huge glasses filled with sweets onto the shelves in my rooms. Nobody would admonish me, I could downright bathe in them!

And do I do it?? No!

But yesterday I did a breach of my own rules. Did, what I never would do with the men in my life, because I want to keep them treasured in my memory as I have them in my memory – will say I never am tempted to look after 10 years what has become of an Old Love –  because: am I being stupid?

With sweets evidently I am: there they stood saucy tantalizing in look-through sachets on the counter of ‘Manufactum’: “Sweets of Yore”.

In my nostalgic brown paper bag with the slogan “They still exist, the good old things!” piled up cannon balls (devilishly salty!), golden nuts, crunchy thalers, rhubarb-vanilla clumps, raspberry sweets and sorbet pillows.

The result was predictable. In a German film of the Sixties, “Zur Sache, Schätzchen”, (“Let’s dispense with the preliminaries, cutie!”) depicting the slack life of students in Schwabing, a young Werner Enke always nagged his running gag: “The old spunk has gone!” (He was about twenty).

Let it be understood: the sweets have lost it.

I: not by a long chalk!