Monster Munch

Fiona keeps sending me photographs of Scotland. She's up there on a little road trip circumnavigating a number of lochs which are frankly making me drool. The sky is cornflower blue, the air looks crisp, the water is clearer than a lake in the Alps... Frankly, I'm not sure why more of us don't holiday in the British Isles... Actually, I'll limit that to Britain and Ireland, because I'm not acknowledging Northern Ireland until they can sort out their views on gay rights. For similar reasons I'm still boycotting Loose Women and vow to do something else every time that nasty cow Jamelia steps onto the Strictly dance floor. She gives the Midlands a bad name.

It's rained all day, nay, all week in London. Today was particularly unpleasant because it just drizzled away like soda coming out of a badly made siphon.

The mystery project continues to develop in Kentish Town. We walked down the hill in the drizzle and copped out by taking the bus back up again, meeting a woman with a fox terrier in the process. The verdict, if anyone is at all interested, is that fox terriers are the perfect pet to own if you have lots of time to spend with them. They're difficult to train, but excessively loyal to their owners. I'll confess, I've no real idea why the woman was telling us all of this, and if I'm honest I'd not even heard of a fox terrier. I was more freaked out because she looked like my neighbour, Little Welsh Nathalie, in, like, twenty years' time...

We had soup for lunch and pasta for tea, and at about 5pm, were so over-worked and over-wrought, we ran to the local shop and gorged ourselves on a load of crap food including a packet of beef favoured Monster Munch. And yes, I am still a vegetarian. Beef Monster Munch crisps have never been remotely near a cow, although I can't vouch for the number of chemicals who lost their lives in the process of creating that particular 1970s throw-back.

A little research on Monster Munch (and yes, I am grasping at straws to find content for this blog post) reveals that the snack was originally called "Prime Monster snacks." I'm told this was a play on the word Prime Minister. Quite why this was an appropriate pun I'm not sure, particularly when considering that Calaghan was in that particular office when the snack was launched. It's no wonder that its name was changed within a year, although the concept might have taken off under Thatcher. People could have bought the snack and mercilessly stamped on it, just to take out their anger on something.

As another little nugget of pointless Monster Munch information, I can reveal that, in 2004, the company (by then part of the Walkers franchise) launched a vanilla ice cream flavour version of the snack, which I think sounds almost as hideous as the salt and vinegar doughnuts I once bought at Sainsbury's. They were out of date and only cost 15 pence. I couldn't tell if they were hideous because they were stale or because salt and vinegar flavoured doughnuts is the most ghastly concept in carnation (or "in captivity" which my friend Shaheen used to say. This was the Shaheen whose Mum calls "Pret a Manger," "Pret Manager.")

Pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch is the only flavour which has remained solidly available. Quite right too...

Tomorrow's mini-lecture will be on Wotsits.

Only joking...

Do you remember salt and vinegar Wotsits?