I just got carried away in the newsagent’s and bought £1.65’s worth of pick’n’mix. I can’t explain it; they didn’t even have any of the best sweets. I was just instinctively spurred into action by eight-year-old me. Anyway, it got me thinking about the best pick’n’mix sweets so here, in ascending order for added excitement, are my top five ever pick’n’mix sweets. I was going to do a top ten but I can’t think of ten, and I don’t want to compromise the integrity of the list by including placeholders.

5. Kola cubes
4. Shrimps
3. Chewing nuts (better than they sound)
2. Jazzies
1. Fizzy cola bottles (but the non-fizzy kind were rubbish)

I was going to include teeth because they were quite cool in a faintly horrifying way, but they never tasted that good.

Update: they did have fizzy cola bottles, but I’m eating one now and it’s very disappointing. Overly chewy (I suspect its best before date may be be some time past) and barely fizzy at all. There’s a lesson in this: you can’t go back.