“Sweetness is my weakness,” Barry White once lamented. Former Eastender, Michelle Gayle, would later sing of the exact same malady. As befits a man of the cloth, the Reverend David Phillips rises above such frailty. “I don’t have sugar in my drinks,” he asserts. But the packets encasing the sweetness? That’s a different matter altogether. Collecting them, he confesses, is “one of those things that, if you let it, can almost take over your life”.
It began, as these things so often do, in teenhood. “Going out with family, deciding sugar packets on tables looked interesting. You pick them up, keep them in a tin for a few years, then sort them out. I looked on the internet to see if anyone else collected them, and that’s when I joined…
