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2 hours ago
1
I was sitting with Mrs Patmore from Downton Abbey in my car outside Langley station in Berkshire. This wasn’t a dream – this was real. To be fair, it wasn’t Mrs Patmore, it was my friend Lesley Nicol, who plays Mrs Patmore. Anyway, there we were, shooting the breeze on matters various, like our childhoods and stuff, when she mentioned something called a Jubbly. She has fond memories of this frozen drink/lolly offering. And I think we all have strong feelings about this kind of frozen drink/lolly offering from our childhood.
I base this very much on anecdote rather than data. My limited research has been inspired by an email I received from a Guardian reader called Bloss, from Marple near Stockport. Vastly overestimating my influence over anything, she implored me to use my influence to get Rose’s Lime Marmalade back on supermarket shelves. Her husband loves it, you see. She can get him Rose’s Lemon & Lime Marmalade, but for him, if she’ll pardon the slight pun, this just doesn’t cut it.
To her husband I’d make the following points. First, while I like a man who knows what he wants, I’d suggest he’s a bit of a fusspot and should have a word with himself. How dramatic can the difference be between lemon and lime, and just lime? Second, I hope he knows how lucky he is to have a wife who cares enough about her bloke’s breakfast preserve preferences to stop at nothing in her search for his precious lime-only product.
For a while, she says, she could buy it from a store in a small village in East Sussex – random! – but now they’ve run out, too. Stopping at nothing, she tracked Rose’s down to an industrial estate in Leeds, where she says it was broken to her that the Lime (only) Marmalade is no longer in production.
Poor Bloss. Poor Mr Bloss. I’d love to help, but it’s too big a corporate mountain for me to climb, for Rose’s is made by Histon Sweet Spreads, which is owned by the Hain Daniels Group, which is a subsidiary of Hain Celestial Group, which is headquartered in Hoboken, New Jersey. The president and chief executive of the grandiosely named Hain Celestial is one Alison E Lewis. I started writing an email to her. “Dear Ms Lewis, sorry to bother you, but would you mind awfully leaving the lemon out of your lemon and lime marmalade? Thanks awfully, etc.” I mean, I don’t mind sounding ridiculous, but this was a bit much even for me.
Why can’t Rose’s be made in a little factory somewhere, lovingly owned and run by a descendant of Lauchlan Rose, who founded the company in Leith in 1865? He’s the fellow who found a way of preserving lime juice with sugar instead of alcohol, hence Rose’s Lime Cordial. Which, by the way, isn’t made by any subsidiary of Hain Celestial. Oh no, that’s made by Coca-Cola. Whatever.
None of which will be of any help, or indeed interest, to my correspondent. Although, in the spirit of not being entirely useless, I have found some Rose’s Lime (only) Marmalade available imported from New Zealand. Huh? Why? How? Shrug emoji. I can’t go any deeper down this rabbit hole.
At Bloss’s suggestion, actually, I asked around for other beloved, no longer available, much-missed products. Spangles, Spartans and Cheese Moments featured strongly. And there was one howl of despair at the discontinuation of the dark chocolate Bounty so heart-rending that I commenced a global search forthwith. I regret to say I have few leads.
Another outlier was someone with a hankering for “real chocolate without soy lecithin”, whatever that means. My own nostalgic want is for Izal Medicated toilet paper. This niche interest is obviously very personal to me, and I’ll not be going into it here. It’s worth noting that no one suggested anything that could be construed as healthy. Nobody got emotional about a long-gone variety of broccoli or anything like that.
But, returning to Mrs Patmore’s Jubbly, the biggest single category was for various cheap lolly-type offerings. These sticks of ice, fondly remembered by many names, seemed to have a special place in many hearts: Mr Freeze, Tip Tops, Ice Pops, Ice Poles, etc. The odd thing is, in most cases, these products are still available, but usually in packs of many of them, in supermarkets. I’ve peered into many a corner shop freezer these last few days, and the nearest I can find is a Calippo, which is close but not the same – a rather posh version.
The genuine article, as I so vividly remember them, needs to be encased in the worst kind of thick plastic, and frozen so hard that they almost burned your hand when you first grasped them. Then it would be a case of getting the necessary purchase on your bite – I’d wager many a baby tooth was lost this way – to tear a hole in the top of the plastic through which the sweet, sweet juice would soon flow.
I dread to think what was in them, but what did we care? We were young, we were free, and the sun (presumably) was shining. These were among the first treats we could afford to buy for ourselves from the sweet shop on the way home from school. And there were valuable life lessons to be learned in the craft of eating them. Go too quickly and you’d make your teeth and eyeballs ache; too slowly and it would all melt. Slurp the juice out too thirstily and soon all you’d be left with was a shrinking stump of flavourless ice. Take it slow, take it steady, proceeding mindfully, with ice pops as in all things.
As for the Jubbly, I am shocked to learn that this (by all accounts) precursor to the long thin ice pop came in a tetrahedral, kind of pyramid shape! Wow! No wonder Mrs Patmore remembers them so well. Even better, they’re still available, if not in the original packaging, then at least in the original shape. I know what Lesley’s getting for Christmas. And that, to make an obvious point, is, quite literally, lovely jubbly for all concerned.
