I was an abused child. No-one knew. It looked like the perfect, happy, loving household and yet… and yet…
There was fucking sugar, everywhere!!! The worst, most harmful, addictive, nasty… DRUG!!!! on the planet. And my parents simply couldn’t get enough of it, and virtually ‘forced’ it on me and my brother. As you generally have to ‘force’ sugar on, or into, children.

Rationing in England finally ended, from the war, in 1952. Rich was born in ’53 and I bowled along (because I’d have strutted out, with serious attitude, right from birth) in ’56. And when rationing finished, the thing most people had really been craving, sugar, suddenly exploded back into virtually unlimited availability. Yeah, petrol for the car was good, but my parents didn’t have a car until 1962 when my dad bought a Ford Consul. I wish I still had it. Massive thing, column, 3-speed gear shift, class. Milk is nice, eggs being back in the shops was wonderful. But sugar just…

We always had bowls of sweets in the house. Toffees, chewy sweets, sucky sweets, chocolate things, always. Even 40 years later, my kids loved going round to my parents because there was always sweets around.

Yet times change. I was talking to Lila on Friday night and she told me how many ‘teaspoons of sugar’ are in a can of Coke, in breakfast cereals, crisps, McDonalds… they had the talk. The ‘sugar talk’. The evils of the world’s most wonderful product. And Lila held forth (as she does) about its health issues and obesity and diabetes and tooth decay, and all very intellectual and very Lila. But then offer her a lemon flavoured Mento and she’ll bite your hand off for it. Joey would too, but he actually likes eating hands as well as sweets.

Then in Saturday’s Times magazine was a long article about a woman who ‘cut out all the sugar in her life’. Wow. She must be glowing with health and vitality. Or possibly suicidal with the lack of enjoyment in everything she eats and drinks.

On a medico-scientific level, we all know sugar is really bad for us. But that doesn’t apply when you’re eating it. We all ‘need’ sugar, from a strictly dietary viewpoint. Because… because its very nice.

So not eating sugar, which is so wonderfully available and almost universally deployed by all food manufacturers to keep us addicted, would be as stupid as having wonderful, high-powered cars available and filling the capital with speed-bumps. Or 20mph roads.

God help us all.

Happy Monday

A xxxx