With hundreds of these retro sweet stores online and yours truly in need of writing something that can't possibly offend anyone on ciao I have decided to list my A-Z of sweets for Halloween. With the increasing Americanization of this pagan holiday over here where you send your kids out to 'trick or treat', here are the sweets I would give them and some I would keep for myself. They can have the white wine gum, the Turkish Delight and the Cracknel from the Roses tin though without argument.

A is for Acid Drops

When you went around your nans on Sunday you would hear the rustle of sweets and out plonked these and the Pear Drops, the depressing world of boiled sweets. When ever I see them in the shops I think of Sunday nights, one bar on the fire and school the next day.

B is for Bazooka Joe

Its weird but when you chew gum you feel really cool, as you did when you smoked a fag as a kid. Smoking was a rebellion so fair enough but it baffles me why you feel naughty when chewing gum. Maybe it's some long buried genetic and subliminal mating ritual to do with chewing shrubbery when we were caveman chasing girls or something to impress her or induce a narcotic. Who knows!

Bubblicious and Hubba Bubba where the pack of five alternates back in the day and then there was the 'Anglo Bubbly', a boiled sweet like wrapped singleton that just didn't quite have the taste of Bazooka Joe, always found in the penny chews section. It also didn't have that nostalgic waxy cover and of course that little joke inside. In those days-the 70s- anything with bubblegum in it had waxy paper. You could buy football or baseball cards (In England?) and there was the bubblegum rectangle. But Bazooka Joe is the king of gum because it made you feel like you hade just stepped out of a B17 after bombing Japan, aviator glasses catching the sun, your green pilots suit and the wings atop the pocket. For one pence per gum you could be American for about thirty chews (the flavour was gone by 29)!

C is for Caramels and Curly Wurley's

Two scrummy bars go together here because you can buy both now in multipack form in the pound stores...5 Curly Wurley's for a quid and 4 Caramels for a quid, obviously.

D is for Double Decker

Modelled on the bus, of course, this ambitious one had two layers; one of crispy style filling covered in milk chocolate and then totally ruined it with this coffee tasting nougat. I was going to put the Drifter bar in for my 'D' but the idea of flavouring a chocolate bar with coffee is disgusting and so deserves berating here!

E is for Eggs

Licking a Cadburys Cream egg is like licking out....a wooden spoon full of ice cream. You really have to get your tongue right in there to get the full pleasure and wiggle and swirl it around until you grown with pleasure. Sure, just as many people hate the eggs as people love them, the sickly centre not for everyone, but once the tip of your tongue flicks the centre its pleasure all around, especially for women. But at 50p each they are expensive.

F is for Flake

What a rip off! Most of it ends up on the floor and it wouldn't surprise me if someone from Cadburys comes out at night and collects up all the flaky chocolate and sticks it back in the yellow wrapper. It certainly feels like that when you open it up. The ice cream trucks are on to this when they stick the 99 into the cornet. As soon as you have licked down the cream it's revealed you only have half the Flake! Double 99 my ass! They say the name 99 came from Italy where the mafia would take 99 Lira for each box from ice cream makers to make sure their trucks got to where they were meant to go, the protection racket. That explains why the Flake is such a rip off and the two chocolate sticks seem to be flicking the Vs at you.

G is for Golden Cup

Whenever I look at these lists the Golden Cup never appears. I can't understand that as it's a stunning piece of confectionary. With its volcanic toffee caramel eruption and the perfect thickness of chocolate crust it's just gorgeous. This and a threesome are the two things in life you must try before you die.

H is for Haribo Coca Cola bottles!

Of late I prefer the fizzy ones as you get more of a Coke tang. I think it's fair to say everyone likes Coca Cola bottles and if there was only one country where these were made the Americans and British would have invaded it by now or at least got their own dictator in to keep the price down of these scrummy treats. My local market square does about 30 for 50p!

I is for Ice pops

I know they are not sweets in the true sense but I gave my first girlfriend a red one and so it deserves a mention. Ice Pops were purely frozen fruit juice in a plastic tube and cost about 1p to make and sold for 10p.

J is for Jelly Beans

Again, the red ones are always the nicest and when ever I go on a date I always buy the girl jelly beans, the ice pop not suitable for handbags. Girls love the sugary taste and if we get 'jiggy' I can roll them down between her boobies and over her tummy for some jelly bean golf .lol.

K is for Kinder Surprise!

The surprise, of course, is there's no flipping chocolate there, a plastic egg thing the size of a golf ball that has yet more plastic inside, usually a toy or something. If I wanted a Christmas cracker gift I would buy a Christmas cracker! What are we supposed to eat here? It's made somewhere obscure in central Europe where all the houses are made of chocolate and candy and is just too expensive to bother with any more.

L is for Lucky Bag and Love Sweets.

As a kid after I had got my five packets of Panini football stickers the remainder of my 50p pocket money was spent on one of these. They were stuffed full of goodies, everything from those polystyrene like Flying Saucer things to the Love Hearts, my favourite being those solid lollipops made of candy cement, that rock hard stuff you bit into that tasted like sherbet. I would give Kamrikha one of those hearts if she would let me.

M is for Minstrels

The biggest problem with these is they are marketed as posh chocolate sweets which means you don't get many for your buck. I counted them in the packet last week and I got just 14 of the little buttons for 55p! But they are lovely and when the thin chocolate shell breaks the insides are just as yummy.

N is for Nougat

Like Cadbury Chocolate Éclairs, this stuff has one mission and that's to pull your fillings out.

O is for Opal Fruits

For some reason they changed the name to Starburst and people stopped buying them. Again the red ones were scrummy and for once the orange ones too. Orange and chocolate is like nuts and chocolate-it should never mix. But with Opal Fruits the chemicals finally tasted like fruits for once. They had just the right chew ratio too. Not too quick, not too slow.

P is for Poppets

I don't actually like Poppets but they are the only sweet named after the packet they are in, now the only cardboard box sweets on sale. Biodegradable choccies girls!

Q is for a Quarter of...

Pick n mix was the way it was done back in the day, a small white paper bag full of what you fancy what we did. A quarter pound of Mint Imperials would seem heavier than a quarter pound of Coca Cola Cubes for some reason but it still felt a lot. Now you get just those 14 Minstrels for 55p. You can still buy a quarter in some shops although it's not actually a quarter. Humbugs were my fav!

R is for Revels

Revels are one of those sweets you can't take a risk on as the centres have different stuff in, everything from a gorgeous toffee middle to a puke inducing peanut thing. For some reason I really hate peanuts and the smell of them and if a packet is broke out at Christmas I will hide them.

S is for Sherbet Fountain

It was insure is the Sherbet Fountain was meant to look like a stick of dynamite or to get kids addicted to cocaine, like those candy cigarettes were clearly to prepare kids for smoking.

T is for Tootyfruites

As I said it's a well known fact that the red sweets are always the nicest. Whatever sweet you can name, from wine gums to Smarties, reds the best. Black and that transparent wine gum colour, on the other hand, are always the most horrid tasting sweets on the planet. Tootyfruites are cool because you can make them last, plenty of sucking to take in the different flavours but also some chewing and nibbling to be done, just how girls like it!

U is for the U Bar

The U-Bar is completely fictitious and made it up because I couldn't think of an X. But if it was real it would be a Cadbury Cream egg style filling with a Yorkie type thick milk chocolate with a very hard dark chocolate base.

V is for Victory

As with all A-Z list this one is deteriorating towards the end and I can only think of a throat pastel, which never taste nice. The worst thing about getting coughs and colds is having to eat Tunes every day so Victory's do offer something different.

W is for Wine Gums

Again, the red ones are the nicest and the white ones the worst. In Nottingham political correctness reached a new low when the proprietor of a newsagent refused to sell a boy a packet because he was under 18. There is, of course, no wine in wine gums.

X is for the X-tra Strong Mints

One reader picked my X and in it goes and she is as hot as X-tra Strong Mints!

Y is for Yorkie Bar

A quite clever piece of marketing saw Yorkie sales boom when an ad company did men only commercials for the chocolate, saying it was just too chunky for delicate girls, this for lorry drivers and builder sonly, meaning girls went out and bought it and got chunk, ironically. I still think this is where the obesity crisis began in young women.

Z is for ZZZZZZZZ

Summary: In the Candy store with 50 Cents