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I'd have loved to have had a lie-in but we had a Fubar radio show to record, so even though I'd only been home for ten hours it was time to leave again. We'd decided to do a tweet-in about unusual stuff that we ate as kids and on the way to work I stopped off to buy some of my childhood faves, drinking chocolate powder, vinegar and Oxo cubes, which I planned to eat on air. Would I still find them as delicious now as I did then? If so then perhaps I could make these three items into main course(oxo), pudding (drinking choc) and wine (vinegar) for ever meal from now on, feeling a bit like some kind of whacky astronaut.
I had loved eating raw Oxo cubes as a child, but my guess was that this would be the hardest thing to stomach (depending on quantity of vinegar consumed). Those intense flavours maybe appealed to a child's palate, but my sophisticated adult taste buds might be appalled. Who am I kidding? I still put half a tub of Marmite on my toast. I love this kind of shit.
The Oxo cube was the most interesting item to eat, as even in a dry spoonful (which is how I used to consume it) you know what drinking chocolate will taste like and similarly even a spoonful of vinegar holds no surprises. The stock cube though is something that I don't think I have eaten in this way since the early 1980s (maybe even the late 70s) and I thought it might make me heave. But like Proust's Madelines (spoiler alert) the taste and texture of the Oxo cube took me back three decades. It was the same sensation that I remembered and one that I hadn't had since. The only surprise was how dry Oxo Cubes are. I falsely remember them as having a less flaky consistency, not exactly like an Opal Fruit, but certainly less crumbly. I was not desperate to eat the whole cube, but it didn't taste as awful as I thought and it brought back memories of sneaking into the kitchen cupboard to steal them.
We got lots of amazing tweets about terrible stuff people had eaten from sucking the inside out of slugs to wax polish. It's incredible that any of us made it to adulthood.
If you want to help raise money for SCOPE and get your name in this year's Edinburgh Fringe programme, then donate at least £15 (the more donate the bigger your name will appear and top donator will win a prize) at my new justgiving page. Then email me your address (to herring1967@gmail.com) and when it's ready you will be sent a signed and numbered limited edition programme when they're printed up. Haven't set a closing date for this yet, but it won't be til the end of May at the earliest. If you want to take out a quarter, half page or full page advert then please contact me via that email address and I will send you the rates.
The RHLSTP with Greg Davies is now up for free on the British Comedy Guide and iTunes. Definitely a contender for the funniest RHLSTP ever.
