IT may have been only a Macclesfield thing, but can any Tynedale folk cast their minds back to the heyday of the sweet shop in the 1950s and 60s when one of the favourite purchases was a triangular paper bag filled with a mysterious substance we knew as kayli?

It was a sort of fizzy sugar which came in garishly bright colours, and was eaten by licking your finger, sticking it in the bag, and slurping the crystals off.

The taste was so sharp it made your eyes revolve in opposite directions.

The nectar was usually doled out from a large jar by a plump and jolly shopkeeper with the aid of a little scoop.

Eating kayli resulted in the dipping finger turning the same indelible colour as the kayli itself, and it took weeks to return to normal.

While I was a finger man, others preferred to do their dipping with a stick of liquorice or even a stalk of rhubarb for an additional buzz.

My little brother was once given a bagful, and tipped it into a cup before adding water, thinking he would get a fizzy drink – alas, the water killed the fizz entirely, and he was devastated.

He threw a little tantrum, demanding that I conjure up a fizzy drink so I obliged by adding two generous spoonfuls of Andrew’s liver salts to his cup.

He drank heartily, and spent much of the day on the toilet!

I have long been a great lover of old fashioned sweeties pooh-poohing the notion that they are bad for your teeth.

When our two seven-year-old granddaughters came for a sleepover the other day, I was quick to take charge of the refreshment service.

I purchased a vast drum of sweetmeats from Aldi for some trifling sum, with the contents including Parma Violets, Fizzers, Love Hearts, Refreshers, Double Lollies and Drumstick Lollies.

I knew they would never get through them all, which meant I would have a goodly supply to nibble at now that the Christmas cornucopia of confectionery is finally starting to dwindle.

I spent many a happy moment foaming at the mouth as fizzy fol-de-rols kept disappearing, but finally bit off more than I could chew when I got stuck into the drumstick lollies.

They are stickier than molasses mixed with concrete, and can weld your teeth together with the greatest of ease.

I was chomping my way through my second one when I realised with some horror that the sweet manufacturers had changed the recipe from my youth, and included nuts in the time-honoured recipe.

It took me some time to accept that what I was chewing was not a nut, but what felt like a sizeable filling, forced out of its hole by the Drumstick super glue.

I finally managed to fish out the semi-masticated mess and it dawned on me that I had not just dislodged a filling, but an entire tooth!

There it was, grinning up at me, while my tongue explored the Jupiter sized gap in my pearly whites.

A quick glance in the mirror gave me a start, for staring back at me was was a rather less handsome version of Shane MacGowan from Irish punk band the Pogues.

It has to be said this was not a real tooth, but a crown I had been fitted with some 30 years earlier.

It had survived many mouth-based crises, but had finally been bested by a child’s sweetmeat.

I toyed with the idea of hunting out the superglue, but accepted that I would probably only succeed in gluing the stray tooth to my tongue, or perhaps gluing my lips together permanently.

I did wedge it back in place briefly, but a light cough sent it scooting out of my mouth onto the bathroom floor.

It ricocheted around for whole minutes before coming to rest next to the toilet brush.

I finally pinned it down and stuffed it in the pocket of my jeans, wrapped in toilet paper.

I mentally prepared myself for what was sure to be an expensive visit to the dentist, whose padded chair I had not darkened for about five years

I got an emergency appointment the next day.

After a disturbing chat about dentures, bridges and flying implants, the charming dentist glued the runaway incisor back in place in a matter of moments.

He said it could fall out again in a matter of hours, days, or last for years.

The tension is killing me.