Sweetie time

On the way home from school couple of kids with scooters stop at The Little Sweet Shop/Y Siop Fach Losin. Losin, pronounced 'loshin', is the South  Wales word for a sucking sweet. It derives directly from 'lozenge', the original rhomboid-shaped cough drop that represents one of the earliest uses of sugar: as a vehicle for medication. (A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down?  It really does according to this.)

There has been a slew of wonderful, witty, heartfelt blips lamenting the death of David Bowie, and rightly so. He was  self-powered rocket to the stars and will remain a stellar phenomenon. This blip however is a tribute to another great man who has recently died (December 27th), the anthropologist Stanley Mintz. His ground-breaking book Sweetness and Power (1985) was the first study of the history of sugar and its cultural, political and economic effects on European (and later American/global) society. 
 In 1000 AD, few Europeans knew of the existence of sucrose, or cane sugar. . . . by 1650, in England the nobility and the wealthy had become inveterate sugar eaters. . . . by 1800 sugar had become a necessity – albeit a costly and rare one – in the diet of every English person; by 1900, it was supplying nearly one-fifth of the calories in the English diet.
The book, which is highly readable, brilliantly describes the process by which the production and consumption of a substance we cannot seem to do without became pivotal in the growth of capitalism and industry to create the sugar-saturated world we have today.

I'm very conscious that this (I'm writing on the12th)  may be another sort of crunch day - for Blip. 
I'm hoping that the outcome of  the negotiations will be positive for us and our four brave  Blipfuture representatives  All power to their hearts , minds and tongues. Otherwise, this may be the last time...