Something very strange happened the other day, as I was receiving a handful of Smarties from a neighbourhood 12-year-old I’d caught trying to steal a cat. The handful just didn’t look right.

“When did they start making blue Smarties?” I wondered aloud.

“They’ve always made blue Smarties,” said the kid, but if there’s one thing I know about kids, it’s that they lie. They also break things, don’t meet deadlines, steal cats and eat ice cream without getting fat, but mainly they lie. I followed up the issue with some candy-loving adults of my acquaintance and discovered to my astonishment that the blue Smartie, that unnaturally azure oblate spheroid, has been around for most of the nearly two decades since last I’d poured a mound of Smarties into my hand.

The thing is, I didn’t know what to do with it. When I was last of frequent-Smartie-eating age I had a strict sequence of consumption, ascending through the hierarchy of tasty colours. First orange, of course, most untoothsome of all the hues, then insipid yellow and bacterial green, but then picking up at unexpectedly alluring brown, accelerating through exotic purple to the big red finale. Many times I tried to eat them out of order – especially the red, which never quite packed the big-bang climax it promised – but it just seemed wrong, somehow. Things had their natural order, and without it there was chaos.

Where, I wondered, does blue fit in? Blue’s a fine enough colour in skies and seas and Smurfs, but it’s not food. What was the last blue thing you ate? And don’t say blueberries, because they’re not really blue, just like gooseberries aren’t actually the colour of most geese. No, the only edible blue substance in nature is toucan meat, and have you ever eaten a toucan? Unless you are a jaguar or work at Zimbabwean World of Birds, I think not. So what to do? Should I eat it last? First? Somewhere between the brown and the purple? What would I have done as a kid?

I presented the dilemma to my lovely lady friend.

“What about your diet?” she asked. I turned sideways so the lumpy bulge of Smarties in my pocket wouldn’t show.

“Focus on the problem,” I said.

“You’re a grown man who can’t decide how to eat his sweets. What do you think the problem is?”

I pondered that. I’ve always been odd about colour. At school I had a lucky pair of red underpants that I wore to maths tests and on days when I might see Sandra Surgey on the bus. Even today I have a pair of lucky black boxers that I wear on long-distance flights and first dates. I have unlucky colours too – I never get into a white car, and I’ve never had any luck whatsoever with any woman whose hair is blonde, brown, black or one of the reddish tints.

“You think I’m too superstitious?” I asked.

“Do you really think that’s the problem?” she asked patiently. “Think carefully now.”

I thought carefully.

“What’s really bothering you?” she persisted.

“Why didn’t I know they made blue Smarties?” I asked in a small voice. “These things matter.”

“No, they don’t,” she said kindly. “They used to matter, but not anymore. You’ve other things to think about now. You make sense of your life differently. You’re grown up. And anyway, you did know there were blue Smarties, you’re just pretending you didn’t because sometimes you get tired of being grown up.”

I thought about that.

“I do get tired of being a grown up,” I said.

“I know.”

“I don’t want to pay tax.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“I want to eat ice cream without getting fat.”

“I hear you.”

“I don’t want to work every day or have in-laws.”

“Mmm. Okay. But you know you have to, right?”

“I suppose.”

“Do you feel better now?”

“A bit.”

“Good,” she said. “Now go finish your column, and then we’ll go have supper with my family. All right?”

But I didn’t answer her. I was heading out the door, looking for a tub of ice cream and a cat to steal. Plus, my mouth was full of Smarties, and they all tasted good – even the blue ones.