The Hard Stuff

When I was a nipper, back when Iceland was Bejams and the idea of an entire shop full of freezers containing food was utterly mad, you could buy a sauce to go on top of your ice cream.

It wasn't any sort of sauce - it was a magic sauce.  It was contained within a mystical bottle, fashioned around a discombobulated Wizbit, with various horrifying "chocolate flavours", each with a conical lid fashioned to look like a penis exploding with ejaculate in a variety of bizarre colours.

You poured it on to the ice cream of your choice, and upon contact with the frozen good stuff, it would solidify (to a fashion) into a greasy, sickening hard "chocolate flavoured chocolate".  Sort of.

When utterly desperate for chocolate, you could pour it in to one of those heavy bottomed brown glass bowls your Nan always had in her cupboard, and pop it in the fridge, where it would refuse to harden in any way, shape or form.  You'd then give it 5 minutes in the freezer where, if the bowl hadn't cracked under the pressure, it would be utterly unmalleable and inedible, so you would have to heat it back to its runny form.  Which again rendered it inedible.

If you were lucky, a bottle would appear in your household twice a year.  If you were unlucky, it would make its way into your cupboard many more times than that.

I hear that they still make it.  That makes me smile in the same way as when I remember Edd the Duck or Andy Peters.  It wasn't the Derek Griffiths or Brian Cant of after dinner treats, but it was ok.  I still remember it fondly and with a good degree of horror, whilst recoiling at the thought of seeing it again.

Happy days.