“SAFARI SO-GOODY”

Christopher Biggins used to say that (every bloody week) on the early 1980s children’s game show “On Safari” when I was at an age when I should have known better than to watch it.

I know! Wretched isn’t it?

That game show also introduced the wider viewing public to Gillian Taylforth, so it’s got an awful lot to answer for, but it’s my own fault for daring to venture across to “The Other Side” for my televisual treats instead of sticking to good old “Auntie” like I ought to have done.

The BBC had a far more “respectable” approach to the whole topic of safaris as witnessed by this magazine I found in a box recently, a publication commemorating the “Blue Peter Royal Safari” as taken by the then Princess Anne and Valerie Singleton way, way back in 1971.

Nowadays, I’m sure that WHSmith would use some sort of ghastly bastardisation of the language and refer to it as a “Bookazine” but back then, despite the stiffness of its covers, it was still a plain old-fashioned “magazine” and would have set you back the Princ(ess)ly sum of 30 “new pence” or “six bob” in old money…

We had, after all, only just been “decimalised…”

(Some of us never really got over it…!)

So, is it worth an absolute fortune, now then…?

Sadly not.

AbeBooks have got a couple going for about four quid, so it was hardly an investment, but it was interesting to look through, especially when you get to this page towards the end when you see two young women walking along the seashore in, what might seem to the casual observer, an ever-so-slightly “raunchy” manner and you have to remind yourself just who it is that you’re looking at as they’re strolling along the sand in their swimwear looking as if they haven’t a care in the world.

I nearly “met” Princess Anne once, you know. I did “meet” one of her security officers who didn’t seem all that pleased with me, I can tell you…

I was in Bristol and was trying to get past the theatre where a crowd had gathered and blocked the pavement. Being just a tiny, weeny bit drunk at the time I decided that I wasn’t going to go around the crowd, and I wasn’t going to hang around waiting for it to go away…

No way…!

I was going to go through it…

And I decided to do it just as H.R.H. emerged from the front door of the theatre…

Oh, we can laugh about it now, but at the time it was… perfectly all right, actually…

Originally written for "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" July 5th, 2012 but not published.

BISCUITNESSIE

A relatively long time ago (well, last September) in another place, I wrote about the rather bonkers graphics that I’d noticed on a box of Viennese biscuits which I’d been bought…

http://m-a-w-h.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/this-means-nothing-to-me.html

Well, a few weeks later on, as we moved into our brand spanking new offices, our beloved leader bought us a box of biscuits to celebrate our new lives, full of hope and fresh starts. (and look how well that turned out), and lo and behold it was another example from that very same range and those bonkers M&S designers (“These are not just designers…”) had been up to their old tricks again, only this time they were doing their “stereotyping thing” to dear old Scotland.

I mean there’s a “tartanish” pattern to the background which might be enough to fool the tourists, and there’s a ghostly thistle lurking behind the biscuit with the thistle moulded into it, but things start to get really bonkers when you’re putting tartan hats on your biscuits and pretending that Nessies humps are made up of biscuity goodness.

Come to think of it, unless I’m very much mistaken, perhaps “goodness” really isn’t the word when it comes to shortbread. “Tastiness” might be more appropriate. My clogged arteries and expanding waistline are testimony to the fact that I’m more than a little partial to the odd biscuit or twelve, but I’d never place “All Butter Shortbread”, Scottish or otherwise, at the “healthy” end of the foodstuffs range.

Still, with each biscuit “only” containing 100 calories and taking up a mere 5% of your recommended daily amount, you can eat at least twenty of them before you have to start considering that you might have, perhaps, “overdone” it, which would mean that you still had ten left for tomorrow, and, as long as you didn’t eat anything else, well only 34% of that particular day’s food intake would actually have been butter and only 8% would have been actually “fat” so… Result!

After all, it’s hardly the same as eating a deep-fried Mars bar, is it…?

They are also mostly wheatflour, which (I presume) means that they’ve got wheat in them and, well, wheat’s pretty healthy stuff, isn’t it? All those breakfast cereals seem to think so, and wheat also grows in the ground which means that it’s “natural” and, if you squint your eyes shut, you might even mistake it for vegetable matter and be able to count it towards your “5 a day…”

So anyway, back in September, after the biscuits had all been munched, I slid the empty box into my desk drawer and promptly forgot all about it until last week when I was sorting through my things in preparation for our imminent “great return” to the fun palace, and I found it there, so I brought it home to show you in these little “show and tell” pieces I seem to be doing at the moment.

Okay, you might think it takes a particular brand of lunacy to hang on to the packaging for a box of biscuits we ate at work for all these months but I remember thinking at the time we received our little gift that the packaging seemed to have a familiar hand behind it, and the story of their ongoing madnesses just needed to be told.

Time for a biccy, I think.

I’ll just put the kettle on…

Originally written for "MAWH - Light Under A Bushel" July 8th, 2012 but not published.