Pear-shaped blast from the past!

It's nearly the end of an extremely long week and 'all' if got to do before I can start enjoying the a bank holiday weekend is a three hour plus presentation involving a whole stack of formulae. What some people do for fun! And the prospect of this propels me right back to sitting the myriad of exams I sat - particularly the maths ones, maybe it's pondering all those formulae I'm going to have to work through. Thinking back to sitting at those little square desks with the metal legs I recall that a paper bag of pear drops would often ease some of the pain ahead. Mr. H, my ginger bearded maths teacher had a penchant for pear drops and would love to swing by my desk if he were invigilating and relieve me of a red and yellow sweets as some sort of exam tax.
All these reminiscences flooded back whilst I was at a client that, rather bizarrely, have a pick and mix section in their on-site shop. I know, what are the chances of that? And on checking them out I was pleased to see that they did indeed have pear drops. Though they seemed larger than I remembered. Which is unusual. Isn't it normally the case that when recalling some favourite sweet or chocolate bar from childhood you finish the reminiscence with the statement "Of course, they were bigger back back then!"? This seems to apply to Mars Bars, Curly Wurlys and, I have it on good authority, Wagon Wheels. Though as I could never see the point of a Wagon Wheel personally, their size is not imprinted on my brain but I believe the strange marshmallow chocolate flavour coated biscuit has lost girth and substance all round. But these pear drops has gotten huge! And as nice as the idea was I could hardly crunch them throughout my afternoon session; they're not really conducive to a presentation where I barely catch my breath for a moment. But at least the aroma of pear wafting from my bag probably helped!