Today : It's a pear shaped world

I've been lucky over the years to visit some of the world's top tourist destinations and seen some of the iconic places that our wonderful and diverse world has to offer. The Bridge of Sighs, The Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, Grand Canyon, Brandenburg Gate, Anne Frank's House, Edinburgh Castle, Big Ben, The Golden Gate, La Sagrada Familia, The Vienna Opera and Bourbon Street, to name but a few. But the other day I went to Oswaldtwistle Mills, in Oswaldtwistle near Accrington, Lancashire.

It's the home of Stockley's sweet manufacturers and, amongst the many shops offering crafty supplies and things designed only for pensioners there is Stockley's factory tour and gift shop (all the sweets you could ever want at wholesale prices!). I went there specifically to buy a large jar of sweets for a brithday gift but was drawn in by the sheer thrill of it all.

One thing, above all made me stop, rendering me speechless with amazement and delight. You can stand on level three of the Eiffel Tower, surveying Haussman's glorious boulevards as they stretch into the hazy distance to La defense, L'arc de triomphe and up to Monmartre. You can look down on the Rive Gauche and only imagine all the romance, intrigue and poetry that has happened there over the years, hoping somehow that later that evening you might run into Julie Delpy in a musty bookshop and fall into an amour fou. You can watch the sunset over the Grand Canyon and feel your mind short-circuiting as you try to imagine the aeons of erosion, the sheer majesty of the colours and the fact that, in the face of the universe you are but a speck of dust blowing unnoticed across the surface of an insignificant planet. You can drive across the Golden Gate, looking down on a blanket of fog that seemingly swept in from the pacific making you feel like you are bridging the very sky itself, you can walk along Bourbon Street at night and hear the ghost of Buddy Bolden and the stories of Storyville whispering in the night.

But nothing can prepare you for...the biggest Pear Drop in the World. Inside the Stockley's Sweet factory is where it resides. Surely a sight to attract previously jaded thrill-seekers from all four corners of the globe. A Pear Drop so big that it unsuckably outsizes, by quite some distance, any other Pear Drop ever created. If, by some strange twist, I choked to death on a normal size Pear Drop (or a Spearmint Pip, seeing as I don't really like Pear Drops much) I could now do so, safe in the knowledge that I have seen the Biggest Pear Drop in The World.

And it was pear shaped.