Don’t Eat Them All at Once

The first thing I do every morning now is check my pockets. Not for keys. Not for my phone. For wealth. Because in modern Britain, a person can survive three days without emotional stability, two without electricity, but not even twenty minutes without a handful of Werther’s Originals. And I’m down to four. Technically three and a half, if you include the sticky half-moon currently fused to the inside lining of my work trousers like some archaeological find. Future historians will probably dust it gently with a tiny brush and conclude I died poor. Royal Mail pay us three and a half Werther’s a day. Three and a half. As though the half is some magnificent act of corporate generosity rather than a caramelised insult. Nobody even likes the halves. They arrive individually wrapped in disappointment, immediately collect pocket lint, and dissolve into a furry beige paste before lunchtime. Still, management insist the half “encourages economic flexibility.” Which is the sort of sentence spoken by people earning twelve Soft Centres an hour. Stingy bastards. I stand in the kitchen staring at my remaining sweets while the kettle boils with all the enthusiasm of a dying pensioner. Outside, rain drizzles in that uniquely British way that feels less like weather and more like passive aggression from the sky. I unwrap one Werther’s carefully. Slowly. Like I’m handling unstable plutonium. As a child, I hated them. Couldn’t stand them. Give me a pick ’n’ mix over Werther’s any day of the week. Fizzy cherries. Fried eggs. Those little blue dolphins that tasted vaguely of bleach and happiness. Werther’s were old people sweets. Funeral sweets. Waiting-room sweets. The sort of thing your Nan pressed into your hand from the depths of a handbag that smelled faintly of Calamine lotion, peppermint, and old receipts. “Don’t eat them all at once,” she’d say. Which always felt optimistic considering I barely wanted the first one. Now, though? Now I understand. The buttery richness. The slow creaminess. The way they coat your mouth like edible central heating. Age changes you. One day you’re snorting sherbet through a straw at age seven. The next you’re emotionally dependent on boiled caramel and saying things like “Ooh, that’s taken the edge off” after a particularly stressful Tuesday. I suck thoughtfully on my breakfast currency while pulling on my waterproofs. The streets are already busy. Pensioners shuffle around with the quiet swagger of people sitting on generational wealth. Because that’s the problem. The old people have the Werther’s. They always have. Turns out they weren’t innocently offering them for decades. They were hoarding. Preparing. Waiting. Like small elderly caramel dragons guarding a buttery treasure pile beneath semi-detached bungalows across Britain. Nobody saw it coming. Then again, maybe we should have. You don’t spend fifty years refusing to throw away empty yoghurt pots unless you’re planning for societal collapse. Every granny tin. Every secret handbag compartment. Every glovebox rattling suspiciously since 1998. It was never clutter. It was long-term investment. Meanwhile my own generation thought cryptocurrency was the future, which in hindsight feels adorably optimistic. At the delivery office, morale is low. Mostly because Gary accidentally dropped a pack of Soft Centres in the locker room and got rugby tackled by three posties. Hannah is sitting beside the frame looking exhausted. The kind of exhausted that settles into your skeleton. “You alright?” I ask. She laughs. One of those brittle little sounds people make before either crying or setting fire to a government building. “Mortgage has gone up again.” “How much?” “Twenty-eight Werther’s a month.” Jesus Christ. I nearly swallow my own. “That’s criminal.” “I know.” She rubs her face tiredly. “We’re already down to rationing. Ade sucked the same caramel through two episodes of Gogglebox last night.” There’s a silence. Not because that’s shocking. Because we all understand. Young people can’t survive anymore. Not properly. Not unless somebody dies and leaves behind a secret Werther’s stash hidden in a sewing tin or beneath a mattress like some sort of butterscotch inheritance. Every week another headline appears. YOUNG COUPLE BUY FIRST HOME AFTER NAN’S CHAIR CUSHION DISCOVERY. PENSIONER FOUND DEAD ON £4.7 MILLION WORTH OF LIMITED EDITION CREAMY TOFFEES. SOFT CENTRE BLACK MARKET EXPANDS INTO DEVON. The old cling to their reserves while the rest of us scrape caramel dust from coat pockets like confectionary-craving peasants. And the maddest part? They still call us lazy. As though millennials personally caused the collapse by squandering their wealth on unnecessary luxuries like heating, bread, and occasionally joy. I spend the morning delivering parcels to people rich enough to own full tins. Not the supermarket plastic tubs either. Actual embossed commemorative tins. The kind passed down through generations like royal jewels. One woman answers the door wearing slippers that probably cost more than my monthly wage. Behind her, stacked in neat towers across the hallway, are enough Werther’s to destabilise the national economy. She sees me looking. Smiles politely. Then closes the door slightly. Like I might lunge for them. Honestly? Tempting. And the truly awful thing is… sometimes on my round, I catch myself wondering which pensioners live alone. Then I immediately feel sick with myself and hand Mrs Hinch her weekly Reader’s Digest like I’m trying to earn my soul back. By midday, I’m starving. Not food-starving. Economically starving. There’s a difference now. I stop at the corner shop for a meal deal and immediately regret it. “Six Originals for the sandwich,” says the cashier. “Six?” “Chicken’s premium.” “It’s gone grey.” “Artisanal,” he corrects. The sandwich looks like it died peacefully sometime last Thursday. I leave with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps and financial anxiety. Outside the shop, two teenagers are arguing beside a bus stop. “You said you had enough for cinema tickets!” “I did before inflation!” “You spent three chewables on an energy drink!” “That was a necessary purchase, Liam!” Meanwhile, across the road, an old man calmly feeds ducks beside the river with what appears to be disposable Werther’s fragments. Disposable. Like breadcrumbs. Just casually scattering generational wealth into the canal like it means absolutely nothing. I genuinely consider pushing him in. Back on my round, rainwater leaks slowly down the back of my neck while I count my remaining wealth. Two full sweets. One half. And several suspicious sticky smears that technically belong to the economy. A woman opens her front door before I even knock. Not because she’s expecting a parcel. Because she’s smelled the caramel. Her eyes drop instantly to my pocket. “You carrying Orginals?” The desperation in her voice is unsettling. “Only for personal use,” I say cautiously. She nods solemnly. Ashamed. Like we’re discussing hard drugs. Which, economically speaking, they basically are now. By the time I finish work, my feet ache, my coat smells damp enough to grow mushrooms, and Hannah is sitting on the depot wall smoking with the intensity of somebody trying to leave her own body. “You ever think,” she says quietly, “that this is all completely insane?” I look around. At the pensioners clutching caramel reserves in reinforced shopping trolleys. At exhausted workers calculating rent in boiled sweets. At teenagers taking out bank loans for limited edition chocolate-covered reserves. At Gary trying to scrape melted half-Werther off the inside of his shorts with a locker key. Then I think about my Nan. About her warm little hand dropping a Werther’s into mine. Don’t eat them all at once. God. Maybe she knew. Maybe all of them did. Maybe that’s why old people are so calm now. Because the world finally reshaped itself around the thing they valued most: holding onto everything. I walk home through the drizzle sucking slowly on my final Werther’s. Making it last. And somewhere between one streetlamp and the next, something uncomfortable settles in my chest. Because the truth is… when you strip away the caramel absurdity… this world isn’t really ridiculous at all. The old still sit comfortably on stockpiled wealth. The young still work themselves hollow trying to afford basic survival. And somewhere along the way, we’ve all been taught to feel grateful for the sticky little half pieces handed down to us… while somebody else keeps the full tin hidden under the bed. I finish the last Werther’s just outside my front gate. For a moment, I stand there in the drizzle with the empty wrapper stuck to my thumb. Then, without thinking about it, I smooth it out carefully… … and slip it into my pocket. Just in case.