Peter Harvey - Looking at the lighter side of life

OVER the years I suppose I must have eaten - and thoroughly enjoyed - several hundred yards of liquorice shoe laces - also sometimes known as telephone wires - probably enough to stretch from The Star offices down as far as the bottom side of Fitzalan Square.

During the same time, I probably unwound, and chomped, a vast quantity of liquorice Catherine Wheels, usually saving the little coloured bit in the centre till the end.

I am tempted to blush every time I go to the dentist when I think of the number of novelty liquorice miniature pipes I have seen off, not to mention a pretty hefty amount of Pontefract cakes and liquorice torpedoes. I have also sucked sherbert (and sometimes nearly choked on it) through a liquorice tube.

And if the all the Liquorice Allsorts that I have consumed during my lifetime were heaped up in one place it would need a fork lift truck to move them.

'It took me quite a while to accept ice was pronounced ish'

In short, I have been a staunch eater of liquorice ever since those days long ago when I thought it was spelt lickrish. It took me quite a while to accept that in this case ice was pronounced ish but I carried on eating the stuff regardless.

During the Second World War, when sweets and chocolates were strictly rationed and not always available, I kept the flag flying by chewing liquorice root, which could be bought from a herb shop near the Plaza cinema at Handsworth. A small bag full cost a halfpenny.

Liquorice root, I have to say, was not a totally satisfactory substitute. It was like eating twigs. You had to chew at a piece for half an hour or so before it softened, and even then it wasn't easy to cope with, in addition to which the flavour was not the same as that of proper black liquorice as used in the making of shoe laces, pipes, Catherine wheels, allsorts etc.

That Hitler had a lot to answer for.

During the entirety of my liquorice-eating career I have been aware, and proud, of the fact that the stuff I was eating was grown and produced in the county of Yorkshire. It came from the liquorice fields of the Pontefract area.

Quite a lot of it was then skilfully fashioned into the items that we all knew and loved at a factory in the city of Sheffield. How much more local could it be?

Now, it seems, things have changed.

I knew something was amiss about 18 months ago when I discovered that my local supermarket was selling small strips of organic liquorice produced somewhere in Scandinavia. I tried it. It was very nice. But I remained loyal to local liquorice.

More recently, I came across an advertisement for 'Australian soft and delicious liquorice ... available in two great flavours, original and raspberry', at 4.95 a bag. Australian liquorice? Why, I wondered did we need liquorice from the other side of the world? Especially since we had the Pontefract fields?

Then I read a piece in another newspaper which said that all our liquorice supplies are now imported, mainly from Turkey, where labour is cheap, and where the crop only takes two years to grow instead of the seven years it takes in Britain.

I'm devastated to learn that we don't grow our own liquorice any more. Pontefract cakes made out of imported liquorice? What next?