Take away a man’s biscuits and divorce becomes inevitable

SATURDAY shopping in 1970s Glasgow was an ever-changing adventure. Bringing up three growing weans as newly-arrived migrants was a constant challenge for my folks. How they juggled things to make us feel like we had it all is a feat of magic more impressive than Paul Daniels (with or without Debbie McGee). My brothers and I seemed constantly in need of either new shoes, new trainers or new rugby boots. A cricket-daft character called Mr Cohen and his vast emporium of shoes was a constant in my childhood. Household goods almost always came from the Barras or House of Sher. KRK was our destination for food from the subcontinent. Other shops would appear and disappear; an occasional Makro trip would leave us boys wide-eyed with wonder. But whatever the itinerary, on any given Saturday, the final stop was an almost religious retail raid. Never before 5.15pm but always before 5.25pm, the Kohli clan would find themselves in the food hall of the legendary (and much missed) Arnotts in Argyle Street. Wending our way through the bazaar-like building, minutes before closing, we would happen upon the biscuit section. Cornucopic would be the only way to describe the astonishing array of biscuit-filled barrels. Ginger, coconut, fig, syrup, allspice: for the second city of the Empire it seemed that every taste and flavour from the Empire was on offer at Arnotts. To choose one biscuit over another, a pink wafer rather than a garibaldi or a fig roll over a ginger snap, would have been a labour even Hercules would have failed. Luckily we never had to. As the white-aproned wifies cleaned and cleared and started thinking about their bis- cuit-free Saturday night, they would be filling paper bags with an assortment of biscuits and placing them atop the counter.

My dad, King Biscuit Eater (ergo King Biscuit Buyer) would seldom converse about the whys and wherefores of the biscuit world. Invariably he would nab a bag of delights and we would spirit ourselves home, the kettle charged in preparation for the tea that would accompany the biscuit bag of mystery.

I’ll never forget my dad’s lovely face as he chomped on that first biscuit, the opened bag nestled in his lap, tea by his side as he took out all his receipts and his remaining money, and balanced it all up. That was a three-biscuit job.

Lovingly, he would share a biscuit or two with his boys. It seemed strange that no matter how carefully the bag was conveyed home the biscuits were broken or bashed.

Tomorrow is National Biscuit Day and biscuits are a growth industry with analysis from Mintel suggesting that this year’s £2.6 billion sales will double to £5.2bn by 2019. Biscuit business is booming. But not for everyone. Meet my pal Mac.

“My wife is a biscuit fascist. She refuses to buy delicious tasty biscuits and makes the entire house live in total misery,” he tells me.

“This might be the first time a biscuit may be cited as the co-respondent in a divorce.” I feel sorry for Mac, but sorrier still for his wife.

Some years ago I made a five-part series for Radio 4 called Tea And Biscuits. I travelled around dunking and discussing life with all manner of folk. I can’t remember a single cuppa or indeed a solitary biscuit. But I can remember every story, every chat, every moment of sipping silence, broken by a biscuit bite.

Biscuits are as much about communing as consuming. They are means by which we punctuate the pace of an ever-quickening life. They can be the calm that makes sense of the storm.

I’ll finish with that bag of biscuits from Arnotts. I only recently found out that there was a reason those biscuits were battered and broken. They were the ones left at the bottom of the barrel, all types, all flavours, all randomly thrown together and sold off cheap.

I grew up munching cheap, broken biscuits – pretty much every day of the year. To this day they are still the most delicious biscuits I’ll ever eat.