MARMITE NIGHTS

Comfort reading is probably better for you than comfort eating, though sometimes they overlap.

I read a little more PG Wodehouse, specifically ‘The Juice of an Orange’ which is about an essentially benign Hollywood screenwriter, Wilmot Mulliner, who’s put on all-orange-juice diet by his doctor, and he becomes a good deal less benign as a result.  Hunger makes him mean and angry.  

He goes to a story conference at which his boss Jacob Z. Schnellenhamer

has a pile of sandwiches on his desk (at least some of them beef), ‘A scenario-writer, informed of the facts of the case, would undoubtedly have thought of those sandwiches as Sandwiches of Fate.’

 Schnellenhamer ‘was not one of those men who can eat sandwiches aloofly and, as it were, surreptitiously.  When he ate a sandwich there was no concealment or evasion ... There was a brio, a gusto about his performance which stripped it of all disguise.  His sandwich flew before him like a banner.’

The famished Mulliner can’t stand it. He blows his top.  ‘Stop it! I say,’ thundered Wilmot, ‘stop eating those sandwiches immediately.’  And he’s immediately fired, but one way or another his meanness and anger is appreciated and respected and he becomes the business manager of Hortensia Burwash  who’s also been on a similar diet.

Which brings me to Helen Mirren as so many things do.  I’ve belatedly started following her on Instagram and she posted the above picture with the caption, ‘Maybe my most favorite super.  Any guesses?’  The image got over 23,000 likes and over 1,500 comments many of which are frankly absurd, suggesting she’s eating jelly, fig jam or Branston pickle with her cheese. A few do cheese and Marmite, which is what it looks like to me, and  sounds fair enough for an Essex girl like Helen.

I also found the above pic of Ms. Mirren drinking in a place called Pal’s Lounge her stepson’s bar in New Orleans.  The cocktail is called, a Helen F***ing Mirren.  Foaming perhaps.  Apparently it contains ‘Belle Isle honey habanero Moonshine habanero, house-made Crescent Vodka Earl Grey tincture with a Belle Isle honey habanero Moonshine lollipop floating on top.’  There are many things I don’t want on top of an alcoholic drink the lollipop is very definitely one of them.  

I also used to think Marmite was another, but most Marmite cocktails just have Marmite around the rim of the glass which is actually not much different from salt around the rim of a Margarita.