Warning: this post contains legalized nostalgia, bullshit psychology and the craving for childhood candy.

It's the little things that really make getting older suck.

Why is it that candy doesn't taste so good any more? It's funny. One could easily make a case for saying that adults eat candy mainly for the nostalgia value. We remember eating it as kids and loving it, and buy it as a result of that memory. A willed regression to the race memory of childhood, an attempt to go back to the past when everything was glowing and golden and nothing was so bad mommy and daddy couldn't make it better? Maybe, if you want to be pretentious, but I think it's more simple than that. We liked it. It tasted good. Why should we stop eating things that taste good just because we're not kids any more?

(Even as a kid some candy was a disappointment - tasting soapy, or nsty, or just plain tainted - and it usually came in the best packaging. Thus the growing child learns to mistrust appearances.)

I guess candy does have a nostalgia value, though, even if we're not actually trying to recapture lost childhood when we eat it, and are only doing it because we happen to want it. It's funny how many of my memories are candy-coated and have a sweetish tinge.

Gummi bears make me think of Germany. I didn't really like them until I went on a school exchange there. I bought the first packet mainly because I them from language lessons. One of the items on the shopping list weas always ein tüte Gummibärchen. I used to buy cola bottles and white mice made out of a plasticky ersatz chocolate on Saturdays. Way back when I did amateur drama (with a tutor I'm now worried was a pedophile: he lived with his mother and used to meet up with the prettiest little girls - I wasn't one of them but tagged along once or twice - outside the classes), before I came to realize with perfect equanimity that I couldn't act to save my life, I used to eat something called a 'lemonade dipper' during the break. And anyone remember sugared mice? Do they even exist any more? I loved sugared mice. My mother used to buy my brother and I one on Mondays, from a sweetshop near the station that's gone the way of all things. I'd eat it while I walked to my brother's violin lesson.

(I can't remember for the life of me why he wanted to learn violin. Or why, later on, I did too. Not that I ever managed to learn. I couldn't even hold the thing properly. I used to get shoulder pains; my fingers incline to shortness and wouldn't stretch far enough to form the notes. I could never have learnt piano.)

And I always used to eat candy slow. It used to drive my brother mad. He thought I was hoarding it and wanted to eat it in front of him, later, because he used to eat his so quickly. I don't see what's so bad about wanting to make a good thing last.

... but try it again and it's just not as nice. Candy becomes just another adult disillusionment.

Everything good tastes better in memory. Just like the sun always shone on your vacations and even if it didn't snow at Christmas - it never does round here - the weather at least felt appropriate. What's the point of reminiscences when they're all so inaccurate, when they always come out like honey-toned flashbacks on syrupy TV shows?

It's not just that, though. It's not just nostalgia - it's physiology, and the maturation of the taste buds, and the repudiation of the bland, and the adult's changed relationship with food. The child's palate is different to the adult's; it responds to different tastes in different ways. It's not just candy I've gone off now I've grown up. It's a lot of things. Macdonalds' food, smoky bacon crisps, pineapple on pizza - all things I couldn't get enough of as a child and are heinously revolting now. Going off candy's just part of the wider pattern. Most of the food and snacks I seem to really like these days is savory rather than sweet, so it's perhaps no wonder that my childhood candy just doesn't taste as good as it used to.

(There are compensations for the possession of an adult's palate. In my case there are things like mushrooms, vinegar on fries, lemon juice on anything that'll take it, Rose's lime juice, mayonnaise, spices, red wine, smoked salmon-- oh my God smoked salmon.)

Oh well. There's always yaoi to make up for it. Twice as sweet and never fattening. Mm. Yaoi.

... even so, is there such a thing as oral memory? I sometimes wonder. Last night, I found myself craving candy. Not just any candy, mind, but a particular brand I had been very fond of during the end of my horribly tedious childhood. I won't bore you with the descriptions, but suffice to say these things were basically just tiny bits of flavored sugar which had been glued together with colored stuff, shoved in a box and pushed on the unsuspecting consumer (namely me) for the low low price of 25p. At least I think it was 25p.

Not that I can go on current market values. Candy, like everything else, costs more these days. I seem to remember Crunchie bars costing 25p as well. They're 40p now. Polo mints - I can still eat them - used to be 15p. They're now 25. It's a sad, sad day when you first realize your candy is the victim of inflation.

Anyway. 25p, or thereabouts (and probably costing about 5p to produce). Came in a little box which could be reclosed, but required a master's degree in engineering to open in the first place. I don't know when the omnipotent they stopped producing it. It might have been because of the stupid amount of sugars, or the artificial flavorings - nothing natural tastes like that - or the hideously virulent dyes they used to stain the individual bits of candy with. Or people might just have gone off it. It's probably no bad thing. If I tried it again I know it would only disappoint me but we, the adults, just can't leave well enough alone. We never can.

There has to be somewhere in London I can go to buy sugared mice.