As BigH has pointed out elsewhere, I'm having a mare today. He don't know the half of it. I've only just found out about this and I'm so angry I can hardly catch my breath.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/05/10/nsauce10.xmlI certainly hope my fellow Arnagers are as aghast and absolutely flummoxed by this crazy decision. Setting aside nostalgia, memories of the "Great Vinegar Pipe Fracture of 1965", my eye's weeping in the cold morning air waiting for the bus outside the old Ansell's brewery before they demolished it to make way for the Mercedes dealers, I want to ask one simple question:
How the fu-ck can you have Aston Relish fu-cking made in fu-cking Holland?
Now Holland is a fine country; modern, tolerant, outward looking and flat. But it is not, nor will it ever be, the home of HP sauce. No, HP is quintessentially British. Foreign sauce? Never!
Before the war, my grandfather used to drive a tanker lorry delivering molasses to the factory. There was an old boy who worked there whose job it was to stir the simmering vats of black magic with a long wooden paddle. Apparently he was "puddled in the yed" and used to spit his tobacco and slother into the steaming concoction. The Dutch will never get it to taste the same. Sure they can have a dyjke spitting skunk into the vats but it's not the same is it?
It's about time we stopped being the world's doormat and at least put up a spiritted fight against this sort of thing. I fully understand modern economics but it's ripping the soul out of all of us.