Once I had a Golden Ticket
The queues outside the convention hall are long. Even the VIP line shuffles slowly, Sophie and her Uncle Kim waiting their turn. Sophie has taken the day off work. Coming here has long been a dream of hers, but even general entry tickets would have been too expensive – Taylor Swift levels of expensive. But Uncle Kim has sorted the tickets through an old friend.
Once security have checked their bags, they walk to the doors, a moment of space - then they enter the main hall and there are people everywhere. "If we split up, meet back here," Kim says.
The first thing she notices about the crowds: there are no children here. She's probably one of the youngest people. Straight away, someone hands her a bag of samples, the logo of a sweet company on the side. Kim gently refuses the bag he is offered, but Sophie is determined to take every free thing she can. She will make the best of her time at the Confectioner's Convention.
The place is overwhelming. They look at the stalls - booking one of these costs thousands, but it's worth it to try and get a deal. Some people are here to buy, others are hunting trends, hoping to spot the next salted caramel or biscoff. Sophie wanders the halls, her uncle following close behind. So much to see:
Flavours of fudge you'd not imagine. Seaweed, paprika, chalk. They're flying off the shelves.
Life-sized jelly snakes
Mango toffee that is so delicious that Sophie buys two packs.
Someone dressed as a gingerbread man walks by. They are clad in real gingerbread.
One stall is stocked with ancient packets of discontinued sweets. But someone must be buying these, paying £100 for a Texan bar or vintage Toffos, even though they must be inedible with age
Puzzle boxes made of chocolate. Actual chocolate. Can you solve it before your fingers melt the mechanisms?
Liquorice so astringent that it is behind bars.
Trays of chocolate teeth.
A marzipan clock that strikes the hour.
Everyone has a glazed look. After a couple of hours, Sophie and her Uncle rest in the cafe. Sophie has collected bags of samples but her Uncle only carries some of her things.
"Are you OK?" Sophie asks.
Uncle Kim doesn't speak for a time. "You know about the factory tours, right?"
She does. She knows that's how he could get into the Convention - because he was one of those children. There was a book and a movie about it, although they covered up the details. She knows that several children were injured by the factory machines, but Uncle Kim has never spoken about it.
"It's fair to say safeguarding for children hadn't been invented in the 1980s," he says. "Obviously, giving a factory away to a ten-year-old child was ridiculous - the very idea of putting them in charge of the safety, of the livelihood of hundreds of adults. He had no good reason for auditioning children, it just amused him. But when you're a millionaire, nobody questions you. Even when children are getting hurt." He stands up, with a heavy sigh. "Come on, let's go into the next hall. I hear someone has finally cracked floating candy floss."
Background
Part of this story comes from visiting the Thought Bubble Convention and how overwhelming that felt1. Part of it comes from thinking too much about Elon Musk. And a part comes from the disappointment that Roald Dahl was a shit.
I’ve written a few revisionist stories about children’s literature, such as England is a Disease. As a comics fan, I’ve grown up with endless dark reimaginings of classic heroes. At it’s worst, this is a tawdry and cheap technique: ‘What if the charming but naive hero was a serial killer?’ This produces work that says nothing about the real world, only about comic books. Hopefully, with this story, there’s something here beyond a grim take on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. As a child I saw only the wondrous sweets, as an adult I see the problematic themes that were always there. And watching the behaviour of certain billionaires makes me suspicious of rich eccentrics, even fictional ones like Wonka.
I’m currently reading Ultra-Processed People by Chris van Tulleken. The chemistry of food has produced some incredible innovations, but it’s quite dark seeing what’s behind the explosion of new tastes and flavours. But I will write about that more elsewhere - it’s one of the greatest works of cosmic horror that I’ve read in recent years2.
Announcements
Peakrill press are currently running a kickstarter for Terry Howard's A Moorland Notebook: "A history of access and trespass on the high moors of South Yorkshire and part of North Derbyshire, with suggested rambling routes."
As part of the promotion for A Moorland Notebook, Dan from Peakrill Press has done a round of podcast interviews:
On Nonsense in the Chaos he talks about foolishness, the Discordian pilgrimage to CERN, singing to the land, and more.
He’s also been talking about M John Harrison’s book Viriconium on This Book I Read.
And, on Dan’s own podcast, there is an interview with Terry Howard about The Moorland Notebook.
Check out Mike Squires' substack, which features a serialisation of his ten-part story Through the Gap. Substack failed to send me the updates on this, so I'm currently catching up - more when I've finished.
The Indelicates released a surprise new track yesterday, hot on the heels of the stunning Avenue QAnon album. Head to Youtube to check out Love is a F***cking War.
Recommendations
I love seeing new ways of distributing literature. Like Significant Objects, where stories were written about objects that then were sold on ebay; or Shelley Jackson's Skin, which exists only as a collection of tattoos on a series of volunteers.
PoetiCal is an experimental and collaborative literary publication, only accessible through a calendar app. Submissions are published as events on a particular day. Users of Google Calendar, Apple mail and others can subscribe to poetical and see these events. The project was created by Javier Arce
There's so much potential on the Internet for building new forms of networks and distributions. Seeing ideas like this one opens up the possibility of so much more.
I love Thought Bubble but it’s an intense experience.
It includes the line “Drink enough [fizzy drinks] and you may end up peeing out your own skeleton”. What an image!