Hmm, this was a daily conundrum, really the most vexatious issue of my younger life (before the lacy dawn of the Kays catalogue lingerie section). Go large and include a max-factor item – a Curly Whirly (back then the size of a ladder) or a Caramac (no one to this day knows what they are made of, but it was rumoured to grow in Scotland) would set you back an ungodly 7p, a Wham bar about 5p, forcing you into major Mojo territory (two for a penny) to bulk up. Alternatively the spread. Jazzies a deffo, as were the white mice, and bonbons (both colours). Anything made of foam was generally good (bananas and shrimp). Cola bottles (fizzy!) galore (better than cubes, unless they're pineapple). Random liquorice allsorts especially the bobbly aniseed one that probably tastes of old people, which children either love or hate. Flying saucers were a bit disappointing, a proper sugar fix was in the sherbet fountain, the liquorice straw would generally gum up quickly, forcing you to basically snort it like a junior cokehead (that was how Daniella Westbrook got started, sherbet). Drumsticks were mostly essential (to this day, some of my fillings are actually a drumstick amalgam). Fried eggs were a bit disappointing. Fizzy peaches, which doubled up as one of your five a day (health hadn't actually been invented back then, sugar could get you through to the evening meal*). Nobody touched Fingers of Fudge, it was fact that you'd grow up to be 'kiddie fiddler' if you ate them.
It was important to remember to leave room for the Fruit Salad (see, well ahead on the climb towards five-a-day before it had even been invented) and Black Jacks, significant parts of any balanced diet.
We used to steal loads of pick n mix from Woolies as they never figured out that putting it at the front was a temptation too much for passing school children on dares. That and employing a guard who had last seen action in the war. The first one. My friend Robert D. was the king of sugary klepto, the emperor of sweet plenty, he'd rob bags of the stuff. Utterly awesome, well, until we saw him buying it. That said, he nicked the money for it from his mum's purse, so kudos. (As a step-up from catalogue jubbles, his dad had the most impressive library of printed smut, which was curated and loaned on thoroughly reasonable terms and with typical kleptic aplomb by his son). By the by, back when Friends Reunited was a briefly a thing, I checked up what he did now, and he's a financial advisor.
Good god, my childhood was carved out of sugar. On Saturday, me and my thirty cousins (to be pedantic, thirty-three) would buy entire kilos of broken biscuits from the market and then go bounce around like we were trapped in a giant pinball machine. The only stricture our collective parents placed upon us was that whatever we did, it was somewhere else because they had cigarettes to smoke.
*potato fritter and chips, or if you were willing to go more exotic, potato fritter and half-and-half chips and rice with curry sauce, though your mum wouldn't let you back in the house if you smelled of curry. Curry didn't actually exist, only chip shop curry, that was only available in the cheerfully racist 'Chinkie' chip shop which, to the best of my knowledge was run by a bloke called Norman who likely couldn't find China on a map of the Orient.