I mean, why? You’re a full-grown man, for fiet sake! Lips blue, cheeks red, he quickly gathers up his wrappers, before cramming them back into his bag. ‘It’s a Dutch thing,’ he says. Emasculated, he wipes his mouth hard, bits still on his nose. ‘Anise helps with diarrhoea…’ Coughing, he tries again: ‘I eat them to keep the head-lice away.’ Silence. Suddenly, I feel as mighty as an oak from which two little acorns grow. I may be a ‘Britse dwerg’, but at least I don’t eat that… What the fupcake is it?

Hagelslag. Chocolate sprinkles spread onto a plain slice of bread: because sprinkles on ice cream is just anti-lekker, dude. First ‘invented’ by a baby somewhere in Friesland, but then stolen by Gerard de Vries in 1936, hagelslag continues to go down a hailstorm here in Groningen!

If you do decide to adopt this particular Dutch diet, make sure it’s the real hagelslag, which has a cacao purity above 35%, rather than cacao fantasy hagelslag, which has a cacao purity below 35%! If you’re lucky, you could even get your hands on some high-grade slag, if you search the right streets. Legend has it that one man, in a desperate attempt to financially help his family, achieved 99.1% purity in his cook. They call him: Hagelberg.

To most, the idea of sprinkles on bread is fine… for children. However, for the anti-ageist Dutch, hagelslag is for everyone, and comes as chocolate hagelslag, fruit-flavoured hagelslag, or liquorice hagelslag (for those wishing to join the Dark Side with all the vaders).

It’s a magical country we live in, here in the Neverlands; where aging is imaginary, and eating sprinkles is as normal as riding a bike to work, or flying around in a green tunic and tights.