Bittersweet memories...

QUESTION Nestle is killing off Tooty Frooties — which other favourite childhood sweets have bitten the dust?

SPANGLES are often cited as Britain’s most missed sweet. They were square, boiled sweets with a circular depression in the middle. They came in a variety of fruit-based flavours as well as some odd ones including orangeade, butterscotch and liquorice.

When Spangles were introduced to Britain by Mars in 1950, sweets were still on post-war rations. They were a big hit because they only needed one point from a ration book instead of the two required to buy most confectionery.

The cowboy Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd) advertised Spangles with the catchphrase: ‘Hoppy’s favourite sweet.’ They later had the slogan: ‘The sweet way to go gay!’ Despite their popularity, Spangles were discontinued in 1984.

a forgotten favourite was Fry’s Five Centres. This was a segmented dark chocolate bar with five fondant flavours: orange, raspberry, lime, strawberry and pineapple. It was produced from 1934 to 1992.

pacers, originally marketed as Opal Mints, were chewy spearmint sweets that were the sister product to Opal Fruits, today’s Starburst. Originally, pacers were white, but green stripes were later added. They disappeared in the mid-eighties.

The Texan was a mighty chewy nougat and toffee bar. Discontinued in the eighties, it was briefly reintroduced by nestle in 2005 during a wave of confectionery related nostalgia.

I was one of the few people who loved pyramint. This was a chunky triangle of chocolate filled with mint- flavoured fondant and tasted a bit like a warm mass of after eights. Justin Greer, Liverpool.

QUESTION Did the twilight sleep treatment result in pain-free childbirth?

TWILIGHT sleep, using a combination of morphine and scopolamine, a medication used to treat motion sickness and postoperative nausea and vomiting, was a birthing regimen created in 1908 by german obstetricians Carl guss and Bernhardt Kronin. The method did not eliminate labour pains, but obliterated their memory after birth.

It was a brief craze in the U.S. when a group of wealthy american women went to germany for their deliveries.

Their subsequent account in McClure’s magazine in 1914 ‘evoked more response from readers than any other that the magazine had ever published’.

The women established the national Twilight Sleep association (NTSA), an influential lobby group connecting feminism with access to pain-free childbirth. It ran a populist campaign in the press in which it characterised childbirth as ‘torture’.

The medical profession was castigated for not embracing the german method. When physicians pointed out the procedure was risky and could interfere with a newborn’s breathing, the nTSa complained of their ‘callous indifference’ to women in labour.

Despite its popularity, twilight sleep had a number of serious side-effects. It could induce ‘excitement, restlessness, hallucinations and delirium’ in mothers, sometimes leading to self-harm.

Hospital staff had to strap the women to the operating table using a birthing jacket, which was disturbingly similar to a straitjacket.

The twilight sleep movement was shortlived. By the start of World War I, german ideas were increasingly viewed with suspicion in the U.S. More devastating was the sad case of one of the nTSa’s leading lights, Charlotte Carmody. after a successful twilight sleep birth in Freiburg, she spoke about her experience in churches and department stores across the U.S.

Tragically, in 1915 she died during a twilight sleep birth in a Brooklyn hospital. This high-profile casualty proved the end for the procedure in the U.S.

Phillipa Knowles, Oxford.

QUESTION What’s the most unusual way in which a Lotto winner has chosen their numbers?

AMONG the many ways in which people choose numbers that they hope will bag them the jackpot, surely one of the most unusual would be to use the sequence of numbers of the previous lottery draw.

However, mathematically, any sequence of numbers has the same chance of being drawn as any other.

The draw in the Bulgarian lottery on Sunday, September 6, 2009, resulted in no winners matching the numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35 and 42. However, four days later on September 10, these numbers were drawn once more, though in a different order, and 18 people shared the jackpot of £84,600 — £4,700 each.

lucky Dip tickets allocate the numbers randomly and there are complaints when there are sequential numbers.

Consider those people playing the american Florida Fantasy 5 lottery, which requires you to match five of 36 numbers. On Monday, March 21, 2011, the jackpot prize of just over $200,000 was shared by the 47 ticket holders that had chosen 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18.

Though Camelot does not comment in any detail on the numbers chosen by players of the UK lotto game, each draw sees hundreds of people choosing the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.

given that there are so many lottery games across the world and humans are excellent at spotting apparently meaningful patterns in number sequences, these coincidences will continue to emerge amid the random selections, providing amusement and frustration, depending on what numbers you choose. good luck!

Don Trower, Braintree, Essex.

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