HobNobbing

Doo doo doo, da doo, da doo doo doo

Oh, hello. Sorry. Didn’t see you there. Where were we?

Ah yes. Words. Lovely words. Now, if you were living in the middle of the middle of a long way away from Britain, you would find the following three words very lovely: milk chocolate HobNobs. (By the way, I’ve checked, and it is indeed three words, not four. Don’t be fooled by that upper case N. Your child might be taught at school that you can only have a capital letter at the beginning of a word, but Mr McVitie knows better. He would be in a very strong position to argue the case, after all.)

Anyway, I had been told that my local Dillons (Waitrose equivalent, remember) has started stocking a few shelves of British goods. I have to say that I don’t terribly miss food items (except chipolatas and fish fingers, which must say something about my culinary habits). If necessary, I can always hustle over to World Market, an amazing emporium which sells everything from Lindt chocolate to Indonesian furniture, via Indian silk scarves and Danish Bodum kitchenware. It’s a huge store, recently opened, and I’m usually the only customer so I fear for its long-term future, but up till now, I have been happy that it has kept me in decaffeinated PG tips tea bags. Now, however, it seems I can get them from my local Dillons (so I fear even more for World Market).

If you cruise around the ex-pat corners of the blogosphere, you get a feel for the kind of edible items people miss from Blighty. Lots of people write about them. Lots of other people comment. We say bonding ex-pat things to each other like “Ah! Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut” or “Ooooh yes, MARMITE!!” To all of you out there, I dedicate my local Dillons. I’ve just been along to check out the rumoured British selection, and I have to tell you that they have got the range of products just exactly right. They have clearly done some impressive research. Either that, or the manager spends hours reading blogs when he is pretending to be analyzing the sales figures on his computer. There is Ribena, Robinson’s lemon and orange squash, Heinz beans, Heinz treacle pudding and spotted dick, various Cadbury’s products, HP sauce, Bird’s custard powder, piccalilli, Branston pickle, little pickled onions, both Colman’s mustard and Colman’s mustard powder (how’s that for attention to detail?), digestive biscuits, Abernethy biscuits, milk chocolate HobNobs. Stop right there. Milk chocolate HobNobs. If I was going to be very picky, I would say that plain HobNobs (no, not plain chocolate, just plain) would have been a nice option, but hey, that would be very small-minded of me. There is one mystery item, which is green tea. Americans think we Brits drink green tea as well as brown (which they call black). Do we? Is this something that we do, that has passed me by?

The British section is well nigh perfect. I’d be interested to get an expert national opinion on the neighbouring French, Italian and German ones (each sporting its own little flag). They seem to me to be a lot less imaginative. The Italian one is full of fancy dried pasta and accompanying sauces. The German one has pumpernickel and lots of jam. The French one has a whole shelf of jam, a whole shelf of olives, a whole shelf of olive oil and, intriguingly, glass jars labeled “Large French Prunes”. Oh, that tells a sad story, doesn’t it? Dillons staff must have reported a significant number of disconsolate French ex-pats asking “Do you sell ze prunes? I need ze prunes. French ones, zey are ze best. And large, please.”

I don’t know if Dillons are hoping to sell all these items to Americans. Maybe there is some cache in buying expensive European products (Heinz beans are nearly $3.79 a can – that’s 1.90 pounds sterling). Or perhaps there is a large hidden community of Europeans here, which makes it worth Dillons’ while. I haven’t spotted any, as I wander round the store, although of course I might not know just from looking. I’ll have to be more alert. Perhaps I should walk around with an open packet of milk chocolate HobNobs held aloft (one of those handy cardboard tubes with the blue plastic lid) and see if I attract anyone.