I was having my lunch before heading down to Brighton on the train to appear on Russell Kane's new Radio 2 show (it's out in August). I was trying to have a healthy lunch (which was rather pointless as I had eaten a medium sized Toblerone for a morning snack - idiot!) and had a bran bagel with posh smoked salmon on it, followed by some mixed berries, washed down with diet coke. Even Rupert Murdoch doesn't eat food this good - though the way things are going he should save his pennies.
It was a meal that contained absolutely no Victory Vs - the old-fashioned sweet that I had loved as a child: I used to eat so many that I remember feeling the Victory V dust gathering in my throat. I recall getting a bit high off them, but that might have just been because my parents always warned me not to eat too many. They had once contained ether and chloroform as ingredients, though I am not sure if that was still the case in the mid-70s. Maybe I got high like an adolescent smoking an oxo cube, through suggestion.
So I was a bit surprised when the after taste of the meal was exactly the taste of Victory Vs that I remembered so well. Is this how they made them. By mixing up bran bagels, smoked salmon, mixed berries and diet coke and then somehow dehydrating that into brown dust which they stuck together in tiny tablets, before adding dangerous chemicals? I might have chanced upon the secret formula. This could make me tens of pounds. If only I had found the exact ingredients for coke or Colonel Sanders blend of spices. But Victory Vs would do for me.
I couldn't quite understand how this taste had been created by this unlikely combination of foods, but dentist Andy Bates (who has knocked out a few women in his time - and men, but let's ignore that) suggested that if I had been drinking alcohol then this might have combined with the acid in the berries and the coke to create ether, which goes to make the Victory V taste. I had had some whisky last night and it's possible that the salmon had whiskey in the mix too (it was all posh after all), so that possibly solved the mystery.
Good news for me, because I am going to save literally hundreds of pounds in Victory V bills just buying smoked salmon and expensive M&S berries and making Victory Vs in my mouth. Take that Ian V.
Lovely to be unexpectedly transported back in time to the Tweentown shop where I was able to buy 2oz of Victory Vs which were given to me in a little white bag, bought out of a big jar on the shelves (so even if there was officially no longer knock out chemicals in the official sweets on sale, this might have been an old supply). I would also sometimes get 2oz of liquorice allsorts (Liquorice is one of my favourite things and I loved any sweet based around it or aniseed) and the man in the shop would take out the horrible coconut ones for me. My mum, with a sense of fair play, worried that other customers might end up with too many coconut ones, but the shopkeeper didn't care. He knew I was a big spender, buying up to 4oz of sweets a week and knew it was worth keeping me happy. He was probably making upwards of 10pence a week off of me. It made sound business sense.
I love the way that tastes and sounds and smells can transport us in this way. I could not have anticipated this as I sat down to lunch. The fish of the sea and the berries of the land and the fermented grain from the wilds of Scotland and the diet coke from the chemical sluices of America had combined to transport me back 30 odd years. And all with no unpleasant throat dust.
Richard Herring's Salmon and Berry and Whiskey Victory V experience will be opening in the new year. And "No Unpleasant Throat Dust" shall be my jingle. I think there might be 20 people in the country who would pay for that. So I only need them to pay £50,000 each and I will be a millionaire (or must about £15 off if you take off the price of the ingredients).
I can also offer my ethery services to dentists. Instead of expensive gas I can knock their patients out with a salmony bagel. Who wouldn't prefer that? (Warning - might not lead to full unconsciousness).
No more jokes. I will produce ether from now on, which will make a welcome change in gas for my long suffering girlfriend. In fact if I can do the ether first then she might not notice the methane.
Nathan Jay (who you may recall from his various musical compositions featuring Collings and Herrin) has drawn a funny cartoon (which I think he hoped to get into Viz, but which might be a bit obscure for them) around the different attitudes towards technology shown by me and my erstwhile comedy partner Stewart Graham Lee.
You can just about read it here.
