The shelves were tightly filled with large plastic jars full of all the sweeties I remembered and rather more I had forgotten.

Back came the memories of being a Fifties schoolboy and having to decide whether to buy four fruit salads or four blackjacks for an old penny.

You could actually get one for a farthing, which was a quarter of a penny, because they didn't go out of circulation until 1960.
There on the counter was golf ball bubblegum - you had to really stretch your gob to get one of those in - but you could keep it going for hours.

There were Pontefract cakes, little flying savers full of sherbet and whirls of black liquorice.

It takes me back a bit I said to the shopkeeper and she smiled without ever letting on that everyone over 40 or so who comes into her shop says the self-same thing.

I decided to spend a couple of quid. Back in 1956 it would have been tuppence, almost half my weekly pocket money, but your money went a long way then.

I told myself I was getting them for the grandchildren but I was really getting them for me.

It was going to be magic. A packet of sherbet lemons was going to whisk me back 50 years.

Growing up in the Fifties, you got a lot out of a visit to the sweet shop - we called it the Tuck Box.

For a start you spent most of the week looking forward to it. Then there was the moment when your mum or dad pressed pennies or a shiny new sixpence into the palm of your hand on pocket money day.

Then there was all that thinking about what you were going to buy before you actually did.

You could make a packet of Floral Gums last a good while and you could take out a packet of sweet cigarettes in the playground - that wouldn't be allowed today - and feel grown up.

Come to think of it, there were a lot of smoking sweets, pipes made out of liquorice (with a bit of red stuff on the end) or sweet tobacco. I gather you can still get them from specialist suppliers.

Pear drops were great because they made a satisfying crunch. I am a compulsive cruncher so I've never sucked a Fox's Glacier Mint to a tiny point or been left with only the hole in a Polo.

Standing in that sweet shop in 2008 was a bit like being in the Tuck Box in 1958. Should I go for the liquorice wood (you chewed it into fibres and a brown dribble came out of the corner of your mouth on to your grey school shirt), the rhubarb and custard, the Kola Kubes, jelly babies or the Barratt's sherbert fountain?

Then again what about the sugar mice (you didn't have to buy them at Christmas because your mum and dad did that as cheap decorations for the family Christmas tree) or the Rowntree's fruit gums?

I can't remember a lot of chocolate about in the Fifties because there was still rationing but there was a sort of ersatz chocolate called Caramac made, I believe, from carob, the poor man's chocolate.

And there was something chocalatey and toffeeish called a Curly Wurley.
I can't remember all I bought but they did include Love Hearts, with soppy messages on. When I was aged ten that sort of thing was too girly but not when you've got granddaughters.

A little later I settled down with those sherbet lemons and a flying saucer but all I could taste was sugar and chemicals. It was a bit of a disappointment. But as with places, you should never go back. Not even for a Curly Wurley.