Good morning and welcome to Vittles. Today’s essay by **Conale **is about their lifelong obsession with eating sweets, from a childhood spent dodging hurling training in Belfast to their recent campaign to get their bonbon of choice stocked in a Dalston corner shop.
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Let’s start with my virtues, before we get on to my sins.
On the whole, I eat pretty healthily. I have at least one home-cooked meal every day, made from scratch. I do pretty well with my recommended five-a-day. I’ve recently gotten into beans (like everyone else). My YouTube algorithm is largely made up of videos of forty-yo+ women explaining how to make wholesome, nourishing meals – they comfort me like nothing else can. I might have mummy issues.
What I’m trying to say is that I’m one of you – I care about food. But here is where I might lose some of you: every single night, as I’m unwinding to a tutorial on how to make a well-balanced summer salad, I eat* at least* one sharing-size bag of sweets. All to myself. In their multitude of flavours, textures, shapes and sizes, sweets are a site of endless thrill for me. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been completely addicted.
My saccharine habit has variously horrified and genuinely impressed housemates over the years. Am I a glutton? Certainly. A product of a society increasingly addicted to micro-dopamine hits? Sure. A defiant outlier in a food culture obsessed with proteinmaxxing? That’s a bit of a stretch, I reckon. Truth be told, when it comes to sweets, I see myself as an authority.
Between the ages of six and eleven, I engaged in a weekly showdown with my dad. He was the founder and manager of the youth hurling team that I played for in South Belfast, which trained every Saturday morning. I did not share his passion for the sport – my idea of a perfect weekend morning was watching music videos, trying to perfect the ‘Bad Romance’ dance routine (even then, I was as queer as they come). So, each week, I would find new ways to try to get out of training.
My dad’s approach to funerals is to slip in the back just before communion so you can show your face while walking down the aisle. However, when it comes to hurling, tardiness is sacrilege to him. He tried everything to get me in the car: reassurance (‘You always like it when you get there’); reasoning (‘I can’t leave children standing around by themselves waiting for me’); threats (‘You’ll be grounded for a week’). None of it worked. Then, as we’d near the minute when we really did need to leave, he would inevitably drop the nuclear option: ‘I’ll get you a bag of sweets on the way home.’
Let’s go team! I was in that car faster than you could say MTV. The promise of a £1 mix-up from a dusty newsagents with fraying carpets could convince me to do just about anything at that age. It probably still could. My parents had always been much bigger fans of the carrot than the stick when it came to parenting, and, slowly but surely, the carrot became the sweet.
‘these spheres of pleasure represent one of my favourite things about sweets: the invitation to suspend belief’
Although I don’t know if this is the origin of my love affair with sweets, it did become the primary way that I accessed them as a child. Then, when I got to secondary school, our year’s budding entrepreneurs became my dealers, selling multipacks of Mentos and Fruit-tella out of their schoolbags. I’d consider both brands to be entry-level sweets – uninventive, basic, repetitive – but I remained a loyal customer. Beggars can’t be choosers.
Over the years, I tried every sweet you can think of. In the process, I honed my palate. The best sweets are sour. Given a choice, one should always opt for the green sour Skittles pack, for example. Developing your own flavour combinations based on that pack is encouraged, too: two pink, two green and one yellow remains a personal favourite. Something like a jelly baby, by contrast, is far too sweet, the absence of tartness creating an imbalance.
Beyond flavour, sweets are most exciting for me when they take you on a textural journey. The Wham Bar, for example. When you first try to bite into one, its taffy-life consistency could pull your teeth out (not mine though: I have very strong teeth, an unintended – but welcome – side-effect of taking fluoride tablets as a child to help close small congenital holes in my heart). But as the bar starts to soften – whether due to the temperature of your hand or the temperature inside your mouth – it melts into a sticky delight, lifted by the crackling nuggets of sherbet dispersed throughout.
My love of transforming textures isn’t restricted to sweets. When I was at primary school, I would devour all of my lunch apart from one single grape. This grape, the chosen one, I would put in my mouth and keep it there while playing in the playground – usually for around half an hour. By the time I’d finally bite into it, it was transformed, bursting with molten sugary sweetness as I walked through the classroom door. The grape was the closest thing to the coveted sweet I’d get on a weekday, and I cherished it. (You might be wondering what my classmates thought of this bizarre behaviour. Surely I was bullied for such oddity? Given that I was also the child who formed a ‘Ke$ha Choir’ and would lead rehearsals as choirmaster in the playground, the grape quirk was tame work for me.)
As a tastemaker (albeit a self-appointed one) in my field, I would be remiss if I did not share with you my perfect sweet. There are many contenders for the crown – Fruit Salads, Sour Cherry Pencils, Haribo Dragibus (found only in certain markets in continental Europe) – but one comes out on top.
It is, without doubt, the blue raspberry bonbon.
In their total absurdity, these spheres of pleasure represent one of my favourite things about sweets: the invitation to suspend belief, to revel in a world where raspberries can be blue or where blue can be a flavour. (And what a flavour it is – a cut of different berries and an unhealthy dose of artifice. If big health or the anti-UPF lobby ever come for ‘blue’, I’ll be tipped over into radicalisation.) Sweets encourage play where other food groups strive for seriousness and prestige. Any righteous attempts to make sweets more ‘virtuous’ (making them with natural ingredients, or lacing them with fibre) fail to realise their innate appeal: sweets free us, just for a moment, from the constant pressure to be healthy. They keep me in touch with that naughty child refusing to get in the car for hurling training, who understood the value in fun for fun’s sake.
‘Am I a glutton? Certainly. A product of a society increasingly addicted to micro-dopamine hits? Sure. A defiant outlier in a food culture obsessed with proteinmaxxing? That’s a bit of a stretch’
I first came across blue bonbons in Ballycastle (a small seaside town on the north coast of Ireland where my mum grew up, and where we spent much of our summers) in a shop called the Sweetie Jar, where the sweets sit in jars behind the counter (hence the name) and are measured out on scales by the pound. Oh, the romance. Texturally, though, blue bonbons are at their best in winter, when they’re cold enough to be broken in half with sufficient molar pressure, before each half comes back together as a warm, chewy raspberry delight. Modern iterations, such as Chewits’ woeful attempt, should be considered blasphemous – the flavour strays into bubblegum (the wrong side of blue) and there’s too much give to them. Some initial textural resistance is essential.
Some of you – most of you – will never have tried, or even heard of, these sweets. That brings me to a real issue: regional disparities. In Belfast, I can find blue bonbons – along with hard-boiled rhubarb and custards and Stinger bars – in just about any shop that I walk into. However, in London, where I’ve lived for nearly eight years, they’re nowhere to be found. Trust me, I’ve tried. Corner shops here do their best, but when it comes to sweet selection, they rarely compare. Until very recently, each time I returned to London from Belfast, about 10% of my suitcase would be devoted to sweets. I suppose we all find ways of bringing home with us, wherever we go in this world.
But then a couple of months back, everything changed.
It’s the beginning of June, and my flatmate and I walk into the corner shop across the road from us in Dalston, as we do every day – the shop where I’ve probably spent tens of thousands of pounds by this point, where I know the staff intimately and could locate any given item in under twenty seconds. I make my daily pilgrimage to the sweet section and instantly pick up on a shift.
‘There’s a new product on offer: strawberry bonbons. But what’s really of interest to me is the brand – Bonds of London … I share the news with my flatmate, also from Belfast, in a tone suggesting I’ve just uncovered a grave government secret’
There’s a new product on offer: strawberry bonbons. But what’s really of interest to me is the brand – Bonds of London. I’m in shock: this is a brand that sits on my ‘approved’ list of blue raspberry bonbon providers back home. Does this mean the shop can order other Bonds products?
Adrenaline pumping through my body, my mind going a million miles an hour, I share the news with my flatmate, also from Belfast, in a tone suggesting I’ve just uncovered a grave government secret. She keels over with laughter, apparently unable to appreciate why I look like I could pass out at any second. Wrong crowd.
I make my way to the till with a pack of the strawberry bonbons in hand. The man behind the counter that day has only been working there for a year or so, so I know he’s pretty low down the pecking order. I ask him if he has any control over what they order in. He looks at me like I have two heads.
For the next two weeks, my daily trips to the shop are fraught, as I’m hoping in vain to see the bossman. I have successfully placed orders with him in the past – as a regular, I do have some power, which I choose to exercise only in cases of the utmost importance (think niche vape flavours and the like). But there’s no sign of him.
At this point I’ve kind of given up hope. Until one day, there he is, sweet as ever, doing some admin beside the till. I grab a bag of Bonds of London, bolt to him and make my case. I must be convincing, as he has my beloved blue bonbons ordered in three days later.
The TikTok girlies might call this manifestation, but I grew up an Irish Catholic, so I’m more inclined to think something, somewhere, answered a quiet prayer of mine. Maybe I’m not such a sinner after all.
Still, since their arrival, I’ve made an effort to limit my intake: I know you can have too much of a good thing.
Conaleis a writer and creator who grew up in Belfast and now lives in London. They want to help others to feel and to laugh. They are on[TikTok]and
Luke O’Reillyis a multimedia artist and hairstylist from Belfast. They won the Castlefield Gallery Associates Prize 2021 after graduating from the Manchester School of Art in 2021. Their Instagram handle is.[@lookoreilly]The full
Vittlesmasthead can be found[here].
