SAFE TOPIC #1: Triple Salt Licorice

Hello! Apparently, I have lots of readers on here I didn’t know about including my beloved workmates (hi again guys!) so I'm being very safe and nice and clean and all BBC on here. God bless and keep her majesty, long may she burn, erm, rule!

SAFE TOPIC #1: Triple Salt Licorice
This stuff is teh horror. It looks like innocuous liquorice, normal in its safe foulness. We all know what it's going to taste like. But slip a sliver into your maw and you'll be initially pleasantly surprised. It's like a salt lick with, at the rear, the slightest hint of flavour. Your tongue tingles and you feel like any second it'll get used to the salt, go a little numb, and then you'll be able to taste the liquorice better. Yet it never does, and you keep striving to capture that flavour, raging against the dying of the light.

Then the gag reaction kicks in.

I've fed this to my workmates and I've not seen anybody manage to restrain it in their mouth for more than a minute. Even hardened salt-liquorice lovers end up more puckered than a civil servant's arsehole, while newbies shriek and choke before spewing it out into the nearest bin, where it sits, gently hissing as it burns through paper-shreds. Of course, the pain doesn't end there. The sting of salt has so overloaded your synapses that it doesn't wash away, but leaves you smacking your lips together, swilling your mouth with hot water and trying to drown it with other foods and drinks. Nothing quite removes it and, like all truly disgusting foodstuffs, you feel the need to try it again, just to see it as bad as you remember. After a while, you feel, you must get used to it. It's true that the first few seconds become a purgatorial bliss, like picking scabs or reading religious ranting, but the nausea always kicks in again.

This is available from specialist sweet shops round Britain and Scandinavia. Buy the minimum possible, but buy some. You must try it, you really must.