RICHARD ORD: Stick that in your pipe... but don't smoke it

The lung-friendly Quarter Bent Squat Bulldog liquorice pipe, courtesy of reader Margaret Henderson. And only 25p.

Last week I was lamenting the loss of classic tobacco-themed products of my youth like candy cigarettes and, for the posh kids, liquorice pipes, only for reader Margaret Henderson to reveal the latter is still being sold.

Margaret kindly sent me a photograph of what is clearly a Half Bent Dublin, complete with a smouldering basin of red hundreds and thousands.

When it comes to pipe shapes, I’m more of a Quarter Bent Squat Bulldog kind of guy, but I guess you can tell that. The Squat Bulldog is popular among the 50-something, working class keyboard operatives, like myself, as opposed to the Oval Shanked Canadian pipe shape beloved of young canteen workers, bus drivers and, of course, Canadians.

Margaret, being an armchair sweet detective, would - if she smoked - opt for the Gourd Calabash pipe used by Sherlock Holmes . She would, however, always say no to dabbling in drugs like morphine and cocaine, unlike Holmes, who loved the stuff. While the pipe is a natural for replication in liquorice, Sherlock’s drugs of choice are not so easy to copy in sweet form. Although I’d suggest a Sherbet Dib Dab and packet of Spangles would come pretty close. But I digress.

Clearly the smoking/sweet theme has captured the imagination of my readership and, having been deluged by this one email from Margaret, I’m happy to continue the conversation.

Remember Spanish Gold? As if there weren’t enough tobacco themed sweets around in my school days, confectionery makers were determined not to miss a trick. So for those who rolled their own… up pops Spanish Gold, pouches of what looked like tobacco, but was, in fact, coloured coconut shavings or, as the blurb on the packet would have us believe, ‘sweet coconut tobacco’.

They were eventually phased out, presumably amid claims that they were gateway products to smoking which, I read somewhere recently, isn’t really that good for you.

Anyway, that’s enough of that. I’ll shove a gobstopper in my mush to end the sweet debate. Although, is there any mileage in functional confectionery? Answers on a toffee postcard to the usual address.