"Penny's worth of dolly-mixtures please!"

As a small boy, probably about eight years old, I would look forward to Saturday morning especially, because that was the day that I got my pocket money. At that tender age it was threepence a week, which was enough to get my chubby little legs running down the main street in my home-town to visit Watt's Sweet Shop. Even as I write this blog this morning I can still conjure up the shop in my mind. Although they sold all sorts of bits and pieces of stationery I had eyes only for the rows of sweet jars that crammed the shelves, and the range of chocolate bars that were arrayed on counter display units. And the perfume! Oh, what a wonderful scent filled the air! Once your nose learned to discern between the different smells you could pick out things like liquorice allsorts which had a very distinctive perfume. I would stand there for a few minutes, gazing at the shelves and wondering what gastronomic delight I could have to tickle my taste-buds, almost oblivious to Mrs Watt's voice drifting from somewhere behind the counter, asking me what I would like. Like? Well, that was easy! 'I'd like them all,' I wanted to shout. But of course I didn't say a thing, too awed by all the wonders and the promise that lay before me. At last I would speak, "A penny's worth of dolly-mixtures, please Mrs Watts." Of course she already knew what I would ask for because my answer would always be the same. You see, you got more individual sweets when you asked for dolly-mixtures! Then she would reach for the jar and carefully tip out a few sweets into the tray on the scales, putting one or two sweets back into the jar if she had over-estimated the measure. Then, looking at the anticipation on my face, she would pop one of them back onto the tray, taking the weight a fraction over. I would hand over my threepenny-bit, together with the oh-so-precious sweet coupons (for we still had rationing from the War years), and with my change in my pocket, I would leave the delights of that glorious shop behind for another week. More often than not, by the time that I'd slowly walked the length of the street back home, the little triangular bag which my sweets had been poured into, was empty; every sweet safely in my stomach in case I lost them to one of my brothers or sisters once I got home!

Sometimes it's good to wander down Memory Lane, back to childhood or to special times in your life, reliving the moments all over again. The fact that you can do it, in full technicolour and with smells and sounds accompanying the memory, shows the amazing capacity of the human brain. In today's world we do what I'm doing at this very moment without a second thought --- turn on the computer and work away on it, writing blogs, searching for information, and so on. For the majority of people in our world it's a natural and normal daily activity. From the days some years back, when the average person did not have their own PC, and wondered in amazement at the cleverness of anyone who actually knew how to work them, we have moved into a society where most households have at least one computer. We have three in ours; my own and one each for the boys, and we are certainly not unusual in that.

Yet, wonderful though the computer is, it still needs a human being to operate it, and so it can be used for good or evil. It's capacity is mammoth, yet not so great as the human brain, if only we knew how to use our brains fully. Thinking about this turns my thoughts to our Maker. How wonderfully made we are! Isn't God great!