The day I could have ended this deep-fried madness!

IT was a slow day in the silly season of 1995 when the call came in to the Aberdeen newspaper office where I was working. Had it been any faster, maybe the colleague who picked up the phone would have been too busy to see any merit in the tip-off.

That would certainly have saved a lot of gnashing (and rotting) of teeth later on.

But, dammit, no. Assiduously he jotted down the details, placed some calls of his own, then wrote and filed the offending article. There and then the curse of the deep-fried Mars bar was born.

The day after we published, national newspapers experiencing story droughts of their own carried breathless reports about Scotland’s craziest takeaway.

Soon Keith Chegwin was doing taste tests on Channel 4. Then the BBC World Service punted the 1,200- calorie deep-fried Mars bar around the globe.

So what exactly was the story that piqued the interest first of my erstwhile colleague and then of news editors across the planet? Oh, apparently a bored schoolboy from Stonehaven, Aberdeenshire, had gone into a chip shop and asked for a Mars bar supper.

When manageress Ann Straiton had indulged his silliness, some of his pals showed up and asked her to indulge theirs, too. And this translated in certain London newspapers as ‘queuing round the block’ for them.

Like Chinese Whispers, the story grew ever more distorted with each degree of separation f rom i ts source.

Delicacy

Words such as ‘delicacy’ were employed to legitimise the mess of batter-encrusted goo in the photographs. Questions such as ‘how are they selling?’ were answered with the kinds of positive noises which anyone running a small business would be expected to make about any of their products.

For sound economic reasons, several other chip shops agreed to deep-fry Mars bars, too. Who were they to argue, if that really was what customers wanted? They sold a few – mostly to tourists who had heard that they were considered a delicacy in chip-munching, chocoholic Scotland.

Time brought still more traction for the dismal concoction. It was not long before some scribes south of the Border were awarding t he di s h national icon status in their neighbour’s land. Then comedians on telly shows started using the Mars bar supper as l azy shorthand f or sweettoothed Scottish gluttony.

We are now a few days short of the 20th anniversary of this call to the Evening Express in Aberdeen and, looking back, I do have regrets.

Had I made it to the phone f i rst, maybe I could have spared Scotland the cultural association with a dish so abominable t hat f oreign tourists now put it on bucket lists of ludicrous japes to try before they die.

A few truculent words from the right reporter, perhaps, were all it would have taken to dissuade the caller of the notion that they had stumbled upon a news story. Maybe I could have stopped it from going global by drowning it at birth.

Had fate directed that phone call elsewhere that day, it is possible there would be no banner now pinned to the outside wall of The Carron Fish Bar in Stonehaven, proclaiming the chip shop as ‘Birthplace of the world- famous deep-fried Mars bar’.

Delusional tourists would not take selfies, battered goo in hand, at the home of the supposed ‘cultural phenomenon’. And Aberdeenshire Council would have no reason to ask the shop to consider removing the banner in the interests of raising the tone of the town centre.

But we are where we are – and that is at the wrong end of a media-generated myth.

I have a sense of humour about most of the ways in which other countries tease us. Haggis, our national dish, really is deemed ‘inedible’ by US authorities. Kilts really are quite funny – and our injured national pride when people giggle at them can make them funnier still.

But I struggle to laugh along with the rest when the deepfried Mars bar is mockingly portrayed as a touchstone of Scottish culture. It is not, and never was. Rather it is a gastronomical slur on Scotland, used by other countries to characterise our poor diets.

Infamous

The irony is the slur receives its oxygen from sales accrued largely by tourists coming to Scotland and, for a lark, buying the infamous snack.

One study found the vast majority of shops selling deepfried Mars bars had started doing so only in the last three years.

The Carron Fish Bar, meanwhile, estimated 70 per cent of the signature product it sold was to visitors who had heard of its reputation. So how are we to respond to chip shop owner Lorraine Watson’s claim that, from a business point of view, it would be ‘suicidal’ to take down her garish banner.

By reflecting, I suppose, that she may well be right. But it seems to me a significant portion of her business is built on a lie – an embarrassing, unpalatable one which should now be returned to the fat, there to fry to oblivion.

There were never any queues around any blocks in any part of the country for deep-fried Mars bars. A few kids ordered some in Stonehaven. It was a slow news day.

If I’m honest, I guess I’d have written the story, too, if I had taken that call. Nobody back then could have known the longevity and malignancy of the beast we were unleashing. We’re wiser now.

I don’t believe for a second that Mrs Watson should be forced to remove the sign she considers her shop’s key marketing weapon. Nor, it seems, does the council want to compel her to take it down.

What it does want, perhaps, is people in Aberdeenshire and Scotland to think about the sign. Is this really who we are? Inventors of deep-fried daftness? If so, wha’s l i ke us indeed.