February 8th, 2009

TUNNOCK'S SURPRISE

And so we'll continue to travel back towards the end of 2008. December 10th and I'm feeling a little sorry for myself. I shouldn't be, as I only have another three days until Christmas holidays start, but I have a cold. A man cold, to be precise, and thus I'm at home, moping about. It's approaching half past five in the afternoon, time for Dougal's walk, and I realise that I haven't yet checked today's post. I thus open the front door in order to shuffle the few metres to our postbox, mounted outside the front gate. And, in doing so, I nearly trip over an object placed on the topmost step leading up to the house. It's a parcel. This is fairly common practice here. If the object is too big for the postbox, it's not taken back to the post office, or left with neighbours, simply placed outside the front door. Where I live there's a feeling of Christmas all year round, but it does make me wonder whether our postman isn't three feet tall and has a penchant for green felt clothing.

But, back to that parcel. I almost launched it skywards, but quickly changed my mind upon spying a little red lion carrying a flag, included within the postmark. Not a long awaited order from Amazon or HMV, something much more exciting; this was a parcel from Tunnock's. Inside, numerous packets of chocolate wafers and a letter from the company's Scottish sales manager. Upon company paper - headers and footers were embossed and glossy - I was told that Thomas Tunnock Ltd was delighted that it had been of some help during my search for the perfect festival and appreciated my comments about one of it's products being my 'teatime treat' as a child. The letter continued by almost apologising that Tunnock's products have not taken off in Germany, due mainly to too much competition, thus the reason for the food parcel, in order to bring back 'fond memories'.

The wafers did bring back fond memories. So too did those sent to me by a very kind reader, who knows how it feels to be away from home and pining for the silliest of things (for the record, her item whilst living in Australia was Monster Munch). And the 'let's try every Tunnock's product' present from Andrew, together with the spread that my cousin, Nicola, organised when Karen, Jesper and I visited my nan in January; I sampled my first plain chocolate Tunnock's wafer. And thus the bottom drawer in our kitchen here in Munich, the one below Dougal's dog biscuits, is now crammed to bursting point with wafers, teacakes - apparently a favourite of Supergrass, who visited the factory to watch them being made - and snowballs. And they're all mine.