Reporter’s regrets over a DFMB

Most journalists have a story they wish they had written, and this is mine, made all the more infuriating by its regular reappearance in the media, even a quarter of a century after I passed on the tip-off for a colleague to cover.

More fool me to have not realised this culinary innovation would become totemic of the notorious side of Scottish cuisine rather than being a soonforgotten chip shop quirk.

I recall my friend John Lindsay, a University of Edinburgh press officer with an eye for a good story, excitedly phoning me about his flatmate Gillian Munro returning from a weekend in Stonehaven where she had encountered the said battered Mars Bar.

I must have been blinded by office protocol at the Evening Express in Aberdeen – or more likely blind to a stonker of a story – in deciding to give it to the newsdesk to be covered by a reporter in the paper’s Stonehaven office, since it was on their part of our patch.

Perhaps my editors felt the same, in not even affording the tale a “page lead” (main story on a page), but running it as a shortish side panel, albeit with a photo.

I thought nothing more of it at the time and was oblivious to the Daily Record giving the story far greater prominence the next day–somuchsothatitisoften claimed they broke the story.

Even The Lancet medical journal pictured the Record’s coverage in its story nine years later about the

DFMB taking on legendary status.

However, John Lindsay was clearly more bothered than me, prompting him to update a Wikipedia page on the DFMB phenomenon to set the record straight, as it were, while also saving my blushes in failing to break the story.

The entry stated: “The first recorded mention of the food was in the Aberdeen Evening Express, following a tip off phone call to their journalist Alastair Dalton that a chip shop in Stonehaven had been deep frying Mars Bars for local children.”

It pains me to read the rest of the entry about the DFMB’S subsequent fame – on the Big Breakfast, BBC World Service, Jay Leno on The Tonight Show in the US, and so on.

I was also constantly reminded of my misjudgment by a notice in a chip shop window in the Royal Mile every time I passed en route between The Scotsman’s then Edinburgh head office and Waverley Station

And just to rub it in, my wife – who I met two years after the story broke – told me she too had been affected by the tale. Her boss in London, having heard about the DFMB, marched her into his office (I guess as the token Scot in the organisation) to demand to know what it was all about.

But, no, I’ve never tried one.