36. 10 Sweet Songs

Sweet Song - Blur
Candy - Ash
Cigarettes & Chocolate Milk - Rufus Wainwright
Candy Says - Velvet Underground
Chocolate - Snow Patrol
Some Candy Talking - Jesus and Mary Chain
Sugar, Sugar - Archies
Candy's Room - Bruce Springsteen
Sweets for my Sweet - CJ Lewis
Candyfloss - Wilco

Initially, this was going to be all songs about Candy, as there are certainly enough famous songs to have put that together, some of them excellent - of these ones, I love the Wilco song, which is a hidden track on 1998's rich masterpiece Summerteeth, and I think Candy's Room may be my favourite Springsteen song, so fast, exciting and unlike anything else in his considerable canon. More than just a word, Candy seems to be shorthand for a certain kind of mythical smalltown American girl, the lost innocence it implies making it perfect for James Lawrence Slattery aka Candy Darling, the Warhol starlet who is the subject of Candy Says and the cover star of Anthony & the Johnson's I am a Bird Now.

However, Candy, though clearly a very evocative word, doesn't really feature in my own vocabulary, so I wouldn't have really known where to go with it. We don't really use the word "candy" in the UK apart from as part of Candyfloss, which they call Cotton Candy in the US, and rather tremendously, Fairy floss in Australia. Fairy floss ... not something that men eat.

On which point, I often think that I'd be significantly more manly if my main indulgences, even now, were in cigarettes and alcohol rather than the ridiculous amounts of chocolate I can still get through. O sure, I've dabbled, the occasional glass of shandy, the occasional addiction to nicotine, but while one can be taken seriously in conversation talking about the trials of oversmoking and overdrinking, overdosing on Dairy Milk implies both immaturity and effeminacy in one fell swoop.
Images of Dawn French and bulging, guilty cheeks spring to mind, which I don't think is my chocolate-eating style; having said that, I remember when I was in Kenya, and my housemate received a package of treasured European goods in the post, he forestalled his natural generosity when it came to the Lindt bars, so offended did he think he'd be at the sight of my applying my boorish technique to such fine chocolate. But I've grown up since then.

Anyway, this is called

ON HOW THE CHOCOLATE THING IS IN THESE GENES

Tramp was the stooge, Tramp was the patsy,
sorry victim of her reputation.
We believed what we were told, we
joined in the bitch's vilification

Each Christmas, after all, we saw her
snaffling the edible tree decorations -
(maybe the sight was sewn all along,
as alternative to this aberration)

The trap was laid, the game afoot
when Easter morning brought its reward.
"Go out with your aunt this afternoon"
that plotting villain reassured

us full of trust (what can a child e'er
do but trust in maternal concern),
on a day ripe with anticipation
for the oval treats of our return.

But hark! the tale, such a tale, unfolds
"This wretched mutt, rapacious hound,
dear boy, has guzzled what was yours"
O Weasel Words! Black lies abound!

And so it was, and so it remained
until years, nay, even decades later
the meagrest creeping tardy guilt
finally fell on the perpetrator

when Tramp, poor Tramp, the slandered pet
no longer had bark nor larcenous bite,
that wicked woman, so-called parent
deigned then to put the story aright.

And so, poor Tramp, impulsive mongrel,
a thousand pardons from you I beg
that I ever doubted it was my mother
who stole and ate my Easter egg.