Why didn’t I think of this?
Why didn’t I think of this?
How to explain Marmite? It’s a very thick, viscous fluid, somewhere on the order of treacle perhaps. It’s very dark brown, almost black. It is made from yeast. It is exceptionally good for you, if a little high in salt. But most important is that, depending on your viewpoint, it either tastes gorgeous, especially on toast, or it’s like eating heavily salted rotting beer.
I used to live in the town where it is made, a town that also hosts a number of breweries that have lots of spare yeast (this is known as synergy. Or is it leverage? Anyway, it was definitely a win-win). Sometimes the entire town would smell like a brewery. You might think, in your beer-addled way, that this would be a not unpleasant sensation. You would be wrong. Even I, an admirer of both beer and Marmite, could find it overwhelming.
Anyway, I sense that I’ve fallen into a Popesque meander, so back to the point. A report from the Grauniad informs a trembling populace that we will soon be able to buy Marmite in tubes. Tubes have their place – I would certainly never apply preparation H from a chapstick-like device, for example – but there is a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Marmite comes from pots shaped not unlike the pot from which it draws its name (I know that’s a bit confusing, check Wikipedia for details). At a push, if you buy industrial quantities as I do then a plastic tub akin to a margarine container is permissible. But I will have betubed Marmite in my house when you insert it in my cold, dead hands.
It’s a cliche to say that a parent would do anything for their child, and it’s still a cliche even when you become a parent and learn that it’s actually true. Nonetheless, it’s striking to be reminded of just how true it is:
In the Hudson Bay village of Ivujivik, Lydia Angyiou, a slight woman of 41, was walking in front of her 7-year-old boy last month when she turned to see a polar bear stalking the child. To save him, she charged with her fists into the 700-pound bear, which slapped her twice to the ground before a hunter shot it.
I’ve posted on Reagan a couple of times, so thought this might be of interest to you all from Josh Marshall:
Reagan had the ability, simply, to change his mind. You might say it’s the ability to allow the facts to overcome your mind or as our secular saint, President Lincoln, put it, far more eloquently, the ability to ‘disenthrall ourselves.’
And that is an ability the current occupant of the White House entirely lacks — a fact which is on display now as he again crosses the country arguing that black is white and up is down.
It’s not certain, for unknown reasons, but by now you should be reading this in glorious WordPress-o-vision. There are one or two issues outstanding, such as missing images, but I hope we’ll all be settled in soon, and without our persistent spam friends.
