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Not getting out much this week, as you can see. Last night I sat staring into the middle distance pondering my sins and I started to look in detail at this label. So what's a marmalade jar doing in my living room? Well, I've been using an unopened giant 907g jar as a paper weight (best before date June 1999), but in any case I've always loved this label since I first saw it on childhood breakfast tables. Robertson's have been using a very similar design since at least Edwardian times when the label was pasted onto stone jars. All that's really changed since then are the number of oranges- far more in 1905- which may tell us something. Reading it as a six year old I think it was the first time I'd heard of a place called Paisley, nowadays it may be the first time a child sees the name Manchester. Her Majesty obviously likes it, I think it's a design classic and should be in the pantheon of such things that obviously includes the inviolate Lyle's Golden Syrup tin. Having said all that I'm now feeling guilty that my marmalade of choice is in fact Wilkin's Tiptree Orange & Tangerine. Mind you the way it's going round here I'll soon be twisting the cap off the Golden Shred. I had some year old Shredded Wheat the other night.
Unmitigated England doesn't normally get involved in current affairs, usually restricting itself to wanting to know why the 8.30 to Evercreech Junction is late. But I've wanted to use this cover in a blog for ages and hey presto! 'Pigs, Swine, Atishoo!'. And a recurring thought that however long the incubation period is of this latest flu bug, it's certainly moving faster than the samples that haven't turned-up in that white-coated lab. in North London yet. Susan Watts stood in a white coat amongst all the dodgy eggs on Newsnight on Monday and said they'd be in tomorrow (Tuesday). Last night she said tomorrow again, meaning Wednesday. Just now on the wireless (tuned-in to receive half-hour bulletins on the crisis so that we can prepare the bunker in the melon pit) some health official / scientist / passer-by said they might come today or tomorrow. So where are they? Still stuffed behind the pilot's seat on a 747? Still in a vacuum flask like in Billion Dollar Brain down at the shoe shop? Sorry, got to go, a Foden has just turned-up in the yard with the gas masks. You may laugh, this is a very nasty business.
I don't know anything about polar bears either really. It's all hearsay, like they can smell you from five hundred miles away and then bound across icy wastes in order to tear you apart and eat you. That's it really. But I can tell you about the polar bear on the Fox's Glacier Mints logo. His name is Peppy and he arrived on his mint in 1922, four years after Eric Fox founded the company in Leicester where they still are. I remember seeing a big neon sign on a gable end in the city and on asking my brother why it had a polar bear on it rather than a fox he just said "The bear's eaten it".
Every time I drive into Norfolk at this time of the year I see these plants rearing up in great clumps of efflorescence on the verges as I near the coast. I first saw it crowding the dirt track that leads up to the Happisburgh lighthouse, but only tonight do I reach for my well-thumbed copy of Flora Britannica and discover they are Alexanders (Smyrnium olustratum). At first glance I thought they looked like the first sproutings of cow parsley, but of course the flower heads are far too thick, and in any case the yellowy green tops are the final colour. They are, however, in the same grouping that includes not only the parsley but pignut and coriander- the Carrot family. Richard Mabey reckons they were a Roman import, put to use 'as an all-purpose spring vegetable and tonic', but I wouldn't fancy it in a gin. You can eat the stalks- go for the green thick bits of stem and cook it like celery. Mabey also tells us that Alexanders are often found growing in the disturbed soil around monastic buildings, where it must have been put to both culinary and medicinal purpose, notably on Steepholm in the Bristol Channel. The name probably comes from 'the parsley of Alexandria', which explains its Mediterranean origins and maritime locations. Although it has been found in such diverse places as Bedfordshire and Dartmoor. So now I know, and of course will point it out to fellow travellers and go on about it as if I'd known about it all my life.
Wall's Ice Cream. It's what we had to go with our cling peaches for Sunday tea. A treat in the shape of a cardboard box bought from the van on a hot afternoon. The cream and blue vanilla packaging, the tricolour Neapolitan, the bountiful lettering. All were what we now call feelgood factors. And outside the post office in the village street and on wooden shacks behind the sand dunes there would be a sign. Shield-shaped and with a row of vertical blue stripes at the top that were like a shop sunblind on a sunny day. I tried to find an example to show you, but I'm sure you know what I mean. And then I saw the Wall's sign near the beach at Brancaster. The shed it's on is ok (it has to be, being next to the snooty Royal West Norfolk Golf Club). But what's happened? Every single ounce of pleasure has been rung out of the identity. This isn't a sign for ice cream, it's a sign for a heart foundation. And that's it isn't it? You can hear the presentation: "You see Mr.Wall we can make an ice-creamy sort of swirl look like a heart you see. Which means love, you know, like in 'I (heart shape) NY. And the bonus is it means healthy. And while we're at it we'll get rid of the old lettering in case punters think they're buying sausages". Nostalgia again? Not being what it used to be? I don't think so. Brand values, as I'm sure they say a lot, go further than the Powerpoint presentation. They end up on Norfolk sheds and country brick walls yes, but also as stickers on city fridges and corner shop windows. A truly great brand deserves better than this. Something more long lasting than a here-today-melted-tomorrow marketing document.
On the Ordnance Map it says 'Peddars Way & Norfolk Coast Path'. We'll come back to the name shortly, but yesterday we walked a good section of it. Or at least the coastal bit. After an hour swanning around on a deserted beach at Brancaster, we walked back to the village and along the path that borders the salt marsh in order to put down Adnams and crab sandwiches at the pub. They've laid railway sleepers covered in netting down as a boardwalk across the deeply soggy ground, a brilliant idea that means progress is swift, except for when a dog decides to nose-dive into the black ooze. A beautiful spring day, walking in single file past flint and brick cottages, stacks of thatchers' reeds and the upturned pale green leaves of whitebeams. And of course the Pleasing Decay highlights of rusty iron and lobster creels on the quayside. The Peddars Way though, is something completely different in both character and orientation, running from either Holme next the Sea, Thornham or Brancaster (the indecision of the mapmaker) to Walsingham and then down into Suffolk. So why do they lump both tracks into the same footpath name? It has that faint smack of a council office somehow, a rubber stamp convenience, easier filing. No, it's the Norfolk Coast Path, and joining it at three points is the Peddars Way. So there. But both worth putting stout boots on for.
The only time I attempted something like this is probably still talked about at Gillingham Ice Rink. It's too embarrassing to go into here, but it involved screaming skaters desparately trying to get out of the way of a big bloke in a red jumper travelling at an incredibly inappropriate speed, totally out of control. These mass sports have always caused me trouble. Ten Pin Bowling for instance. What's that all about? If you're really good at it, as everybody else always appears to be, you knock all those skittle things down with one ball every time. So what's the point. "Let's go bowling" someone says, always after everybody has sunk a shed-load of drink at a Christmas lunch. No thankyou, I don't want to have to take my shoes off at three thirty in the afternoon. I get so cross I want to wave a gun about like John Goodman does at the bowling alley in The Big Lebowski. No, bowling should be about gently rolling one down a greensward, pipe in mouth, faint applause from a weatherboarded pavilion with a clock on it. Which is absolutely nothing to do with this week's picture.
Not getting out much this week, as you can see. Last night I sat staring into the middle distance pondering my sins and I started to look in detail at this label. So what's a marmalade jar doing in my living room? Well, I've been using an unopened giant 907g jar as a paper weight (best before date June 1999), but in any case I've always loved this label since I first saw it on childhood breakfast tables. Robertson's have been using a very similar design since at least Edwardian times when the label was pasted onto stone jars. All that's really changed since then are the number of oranges- far more in 1905- which may tell us something. Reading it as a six year old I think it was the first time I'd heard of a place called Paisley, nowadays it may be the first time a child sees the name Manchester. Her Majesty obviously likes it, I think it's a design classic and should be in the pantheon of such things that obviously includes the inviolate Lyle's Golden Syrup tin. Having said all that I'm now feeling guilty that my marmalade of choice is in fact Wilkin's Tiptree Orange & Tangerine. Mind you the way it's going round here I'll soon be twisting the cap off the Golden Shred. I had some year old Shredded Wheat the other night.
