Ian McEwan on crisps

One day I hope Ian McEwan will write a whole novel about crisps. But this will do for now.

"He was a man to take his pleasures seriously. The trick was to set the fragment on the centre of the tongue and, after a moment's spreading sensation, push the potato up hard to shatter against the roof of the mouth. His theory was that the rigid irregular surface caused tiny abrasions in the soft flesh into which salt and chemicals poured, creating a mild and distinctive pleasure-pain."

Ian McEwan, Solar (Jonathan Cape: London, 2010)

Monster raving

They're back! Yes, like the Wispa, Roast Beef flavour Monster Munch have returned to the shop shelves, and not even Iceland's theft of my savings is enough to stop me getting my hands on a packet.*

To my mother, who once famously denounced this particular flavour as "tasting like cardboard", I would say this: never has cardboard tasted so good!

* Say what you like, but The Electric Goose can never be accused of ignoring the big issues.

Crisp rejoinder

This is my kind of blog post. We need to keep the dialogue going.


The Electric Goose: a crisp retrospective
August 12 2005: Crisp innovation league
February 6 2006: A letter of complaint
February 14 2006: A crisp response
March 2 2006: The death of Mishima / the birth of new Hula Hoops

Onward crisping soldiers

A necessary truth: if you don't like salt and vinegar flavoured crisps, multipack purchases become either monotonous, or untenable.

The death of Mishima / the birth of new Hula Hoops

I was reading an interview in an old magazine with a forensics expert the other day and he was asked to name the strangest fact that he'd found out in his job. His answer was quite unexpected, nothing grizzly at all: it was that most suicides remove their shoes before killing themselves.

Today I was reminded of the extraordinary way in which Japanese writer Yukio Mishima ended his life. Having finished the the final book in his Sea of Fertility tetralogy, he dropped the completed manuscript off at his publishers and went to the Tokyo headquarters of Japan's Self-Defense Force where he read a manifesto, and committed seppuku, ritual suicide, disembowelling himself with a sword, after which a colleague cut his head off.

***

Hula Hoops have brought out a new flavour of crisps, called Sheriff's Saucy Ribs. The packet is an unlikely mauve pink colour, but it's the crisps themselves that really shock in the colour department. It's insane: they look almost radioactive. The taste? Saucy, with hints of bacon, reminiscent of a long summer day spent with a new lover lying on an empty green expanse of grass.

Crisp response

Good news! I got a reply from United Biscuits, following my letter of complaint. In response to the suggestion that I’d found "a mutant life form" in my packet of Rostyers T-Bone Steak crisps, the consumer services co-ordinator said:

"The material found in the packet appears to be of the same ingredients as the finished product, but showing signs that it had become malformed at a point in the production process where heat is present, causing it to become hard. We would normally expect such conglomerated ingredients to be removed by the system."

As an "indication of goodwill", I was sent £2 worth of KP vouchers, which I can use to buy five packets of Rosters T-Bone Steak crisps. Although I’m seriously considering going for barbeque beef flavoured Hula Hoops next time...

A letter of complaint

Some readers have suggested that this blog is getting too highbrow, and that perhaps it's time to return to the days when I wrote about crisps and other more mundane matters. Well kids, this is your lucky day, because I just started eating a packet of crisps so hideous that it made me put pen to paper in disgust. By the way, it feels really strange to sellotape up a half-eaten packet of Roysters and then put it in a big envelope.


Dear Sir / Madam,

I'm writing to complain about a packet of your Royster's T-Bone Steak crisps I purchased from Oxford News, 78 Oxford Street, London today. Most of the crisps tasted stale, with none of the crunch I'd expect from the usually reliable Roysters brand. I was disappointed, but not devastated. That was until I reached the middle of the pack, where I came across a lump of uncooked crisp material welded together, looking like a mutant life form originating from a galaxy far from our own.

The fact that Roysters now seem to be available in only one flavour should surely improve quality, but the enclosed evidence disproves this theory dramatically, and tragically.

Anyways, the half-eaten packet is enclosed. Hope you have more fun with it than I did.

Yours sincerely,
Will Parkhouse

enc

Crisp innovation league

Saw an advert yesterday for an invention that will surely shake the world of crisps to its very core. A jumbo pack of Doritos that opens side-on. Thus solving the irritating sticking-your-hand-in routine when sharing crisps.

I really hope there's a trendy creative who got paid millions to come up with that idea. In my opinion, he moves swiftly into 3rd place in the 21st Century Crisp Innovation League, just behind the kid who came up with Walker's Sensations ("I've got it! Crisps for posh people!") and the girl wonder who realised they should put the flavour on the inside of Hula Hoops as well as the outside ("If we could just find a way to get the flavour on both sides. Hold on...!").

Went for a drink last night with my friend Rick, who I've known for 16 years now. We met up in this Clapham bar called Rinky Dinks (horrible name), where Rick claimed his brother recently saw Val Kilmer (who is, in fact, in London, doing The Postman Always Rings Twice). He told me that one of his friends had recently been beaten up in Brixton "by 15 black guys" as revenge for the murder of teenager Anthony Walker and had both his legs broken. Rick said that he'd been going to the gym a bit more as a precaution. I'm not sure this'll help him much if he does get attacked, but if it makes him happy...

Then we saw this bloke we both knew at university walking past. He stopped to have a drink too. You know how people with more common names often get given a prefix ("Crazy Jamie", "Swiss Andy" etc)? Well this guy has it worse than most. He's known as Gyno John. Because his Dad is a gynaecologist. And the funny thing is: everyone calls him this, all the time.