Thorntons Chocolate

The sweet taste of the Seventies!

When I was an inquistive little girl growing up in a Lancashire mill town, the biggest treat of the week for me was to go ’round the shops’ with my Mum and my Grandmother. Preston was a smallish town back then with all of two shopping streets and a market, but we always managed to make an afternoon of it. Since I was one of those irritating children whose idea of fun was listening in on adult conversations, those Saturday afternoons were heaven: there’s nothing that gets a conversation going beween women better than wandering round the shops together. So while my Mum and Grandma discussed family members and acquaintance, arcane details of foundation garments and other people’s (disastrous) outfits, I followed, ears wagging. About halfway round - the top floor of St George’s Shopping Centre to be precise - we would pass Thorntons Chocolate Cabin, a place of barely imaginable exotic treats like "continental chocolates" and "chocolate ginger": all of them way out of pocket money price range. We never actually managed to pass it. My Mum and Grandma would exchange a look and one or other would say, "I could just fancy some of that Brazil Nut toffee" and we’d soon be sharing a bag. It had to be that particular type - we never considered any other flavour and for many years I don’t think I knew there were any. It slowed the conversation a bit, because none of us could resist going for the really big lumps; and now I can realise it’s probably also responsible for some rather nasty root canal work, but I loved it then and I still do. I don’t live in the North of England any more, but whenever I go back, no wander round the town is complete without a bag of Thorntons Special Brazil Nut Toffee.

The funny thing is I could buy it in my local Woolies in London any day of the week. But it just doesn’t appeal. My Saturday afternoons these days don’t include slow companionable ambling round the shops. For me Thornton’s Special Brazil Nut Toffee is the taste of those slow, simple, structured times when the two main streets of Preston were the edges of the universe; when family and relatives were my whole social world and when getting to be 10 (double figures!) was the greatest excitment I could imagine. Ah, Thorntons Special Brazil Nut Toffee - the sweet taste of the Seventies!

Deborah, United Kingdom - 15 July 2007