Poppalina

When Gummy Bears Go Wrong

At work, we have a roaming 10 cent piece, (that would be a dime, for you Yanks), that resides proudly on the workstation of whomever finds the weirdest lolly fuckup for that day. The winner gets to hang on to it until someone ups the ante (or wins at Guess That Obscure White Pop Song from the 1960s, whichever comes first).

The Boss won, hands down, last week, with this:

The Tower of Bearbel.

I guess the gummy bear machine must have sneezed, or something.

As you can see, Life is just one long party for Lolly Woman.

The Mighty Fizzoe

I couldn't decide which photo I liked best,

So I posted them all.

When I was a kid, one cent bought four fizzoes,

Making them Very Good Value,

And a Big Favourite.

Come to think of it, everything I ever learned about economics,

I learned in the lolly shop.

Fizzoes are rock hard.

They taste like lemonade.

They fizz up in your mouth.

And they're every bit as good as I remember.

Jaffas

Orange-flavoured, candy-coated chocolate balls.

Famous for munching at the movies,

rolling noisily down the aisles,

or doinking people on the back of the head from an anonymous distance at the denouement,

jaffas are the Anarchists of Lollies.

 

  

The Kiwis, no doubt, lay claim to the invention of jaffas, like everything else good in the Universe,

but once again, they are totally dreaming....

although I only say this because I am Austrayan.

If I were to be A Truly Honest Lolly Woman, I would be obliged to admit that the very best lollies come out of New Zealand.

After all, the jaffa-rolling event, where they roll thousands of jaffas down a very steep hill once a year just for the Hell of it,

occurs in Dunedin, New Zealand, and not in Melbourne, Australia.

Bloody brilliant.

The longer I work in a lolly shop, the more seriously I consider moving to New Zealand.

I

When Lolly Design Goes Wrong

Designers of Giant Jelly Babies should note

That what might have looked cute on the drawing board

Could well, after the distortions of casting, manufacture and transport,

   

Mutate into something seriously bloody disturbing.

 

The Healing Power of Musk

Opening a 10kg box of musk sticks for the very first time is a Powerful Experience. 

All that pent-up scent just hits you like a truck,

But it has to be inhaled personally to be believed.

Let me just say, for those of you who have never had the pleasure, that it's a blast.

Your average Australian of the 1960s and 70s grew up with the Local Lolly Shop, where you could take the hard-earned money you'd made that day by walking the three miles to school instead of catching the bus like a normal person, and buy yourself a small bag of mixed lollies.

No self-respecting lolly shop in Australia (that didn't want to be firebombed) would ever have dreamed of running out of musk sticks. To not have a musk stick poking out the top of your lolly bag (or a sherbet bomb sitting at the bottom, to be saved till last) was, quite simply, unthinkable, and the prospect of facing down the wall-eyed expression of a child with 11 cents in her hand, a whole day of sugar on her mind, and a visceral need for musk, was probably more than a lolly shop owner's life was worth.

Musk sticks were a Constant of Life. Ubiquitous. Omnipresent. You could depend on their existence the way you could depend on your Nana still loving you tomorrow, no matter how much of a little shit you'd been today. In my whole childhood, I don't believe I ever once bought a bag of mixed lollies that didn't have at least one musk stick in it. Nor did I ever know them to be unavailable for purchase. In the changeable and often treacherous world of children, there was comfort and security to be found in the constancy and reliability of the humble musk stick.

Seriously.

Sadly, as a grown up, the actual taste of musk sticks doesn't live up to my nostalgic expectations. Perhaps they changed somewhere down the line. Maybe I just got old. I'm yet to see anyone under 15 complain about the flavour, but I'm pretty sure it's not the same.

Never mind. You can't have everything. I'm perfectly content just to dangle my face over the box, inhale deeply, and sigh with pleasure. I can just smell the prana....