Let’s do this together
COMMUNITY CORNER Edited by SIOBHANMcNALLY
Today is both National Biscuit Day and also my mum’s 78th birthday, which is ironic because she isn’t a fan of biscuits (or anything with unrefined sugar, trans fats… or taste, really).
The only biscuit my Scottish mum eats is an oatcake, full of fibre and frugal simplicity.
When we were kids, she only ever allowed plain digestives in the house, so we had to go to her mum’s, my Glaswegian granny, for a big tin of Rover’s biscuits.
Granny was rather partial to a custard cream dunked in tea, while I always raided the lower layers of the tin for all the good ones – bourbon creams and pink wafers.
My younger brother, James, had an even more disgusting habit of nibbling all the jam insides from the jammy ones, then putting the soggy ends back in the tin.
The other old retro biscuits I loved were Lemon Puffs and Iced Gems, but couldn’t bear Grandpa’s Garibaldi’s, which we called “fly biscuits”.
I can no longer eat ginger snaps because I nibbled on so many of them while pregnant with The Dark Lord to help with the nausea. Now just the smell of them takes me straight back to those days. If only I had known then what was to come with the Teenage Bringer of Chaos, I would have relished those quiet, queasy days a bit more!
I don’t buy many biscuits at home, mainly because The Dark Lord never seals the packaging properly and by the time I get to them, they’ve all gone soft.
For someone who surprisingly managed to get 73% in her chemistry test last week, she seems blissfully unaware of what happens when dry, crunchy biscuits meet moisture in the air…
PS. I’m off for half term this week and leaving you with a new colleague, Karen Bryans, who says she has both a husband and cats. No guessing who comes first in the pecking order.
Email siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.
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