missing england

I'm sure that when people ask me what I most miss about England they don't expect that the answer will be peppermint Aeros - a particular kind of chocolate bar only available in the UK (well, for that matter in Canada and Australia - the colonies! - but not the US).   Of course that isn't strictly true, as answers go, but it is a seductive little treat.   I'm not quite sure what I associate it with, because it was only introduced in 1973, the year I started college (maybe that's the answer?   But I don't think of it in connection with guilty binges in the same way that I do packets of chocolate digestive biscuits, or butterscotch Angel Delight).

These phrases, of course, are enough to sum up an era, and probably a country, in their own right.   I wouldn't count myself as a sweet eater (that's a consumer of candy, in translation) - so long as one thinks of chocolate as something else - though the first confectionery that I can remember purchasing certainly did fall into the category of sweets: aniseed balls, from a jar on Mr Smith the grocer's counter in Brampton, Cumberland, where they were 8 for a penny (that was two for a farthing).   One sucked them, to be left with a little sweet/sour anis seed at the center - and there was a deep crimson dye that leaked off their outsides.   When we moved back to Wimbledon, there was a bow-windowed sweet shop, now demolished, near the top of our road, and I used to buy certain treats on the way back from school: sherbet flying saucers, love hearts - which were also sherbetty - licorice fountains (ditto) - candy cigarettes, with scarlet ends mimicking filters, and - an occasional foray into the more expensive realm of chocolate - 2d Cadbury's  chocolate flakes, which could be crumbled up and eaten very very slowly.

Chocolate itself lived in the corner cupboard in our dining room, and was dispensed, like medicine, on a nightly, after-dinner basis: one, or maybe two, squares at a time.   These bars could be Cadbury's Dairy Milk (in a lovely purple wrapper, but boring), Cadbury's Fruit and Nut, which had too many raisins for my liking; Bournville plain chocolate (yes!) and the best of them all, Cadbury's Dark Chocolate with Roasted Almonds.   At Christmas (but this was when I was younger) there were, once or twice, pink round boxes of Charbonnel et Walker chocolates, and some very nasty violet creams from Fortnum and Mason.   The occasional box of chocolates would appear: Cadbury's Milk Tray (nasty), and Terry's All Gold assortment.   When Galaxy chocolate was introduced, it was marketed as creamy and therefore up market, for some reason - it probably meant that it had some kind of glutinous emulsifier in it.   For a very rare pleasurable morsel, there were the honeyed, almondy triangles of Toblerone.   At worst, someone would bring some Edinburgh Rock as a present - much grittier than Brighton Rock, with its festive thin red stripes and lettering running through it - so gritty, indeed, that I harbored a conviction that it was made of sand.