The sweetest thing

ALTHOUGH it’s true that we all have to grow up eventually, the childish delight of certain sweets never quite goes away and, in Britain, we have created and produced some of the finest and most durable names in confectionery history.

Spotting an old favourite sitting on the shelf in a newsagent’s can conjure childhood memories in a way that not much else does, hence the inevitable national outrage when large corporations announce their intentions to tinker with the wrapper or recipe of a sweet that’s been around so long it feels somewhat immortal—Barratt’s Sherbet Fountain was the centre of a media storm in 2009, when the packaging was updated from a paper tube to resealable plastic. ‘Killjoys take the fun out of the Sherbet Fountain,’ claimed and acknowledged that, for the sweet’s