Marmalade is not really my jam

I like the idea of marmalade, but it's really not my jam. But the taste always does make me hark back to Victorian England, when I sat at the dining table, circa 1881, taking breakfast, toast with a nice, fresh marmalade - freshly squeezed from a hen - in my white smock, reading the news on my iPad - “Queen Victoria beheads rogue marmalade maker”, “Victoria snubs new sour marmalade”, and the like. 

Back in the very old days, when life was really quite shit, unless you were obscenely wealthy, but even then... marmalade was taken in the evening, but it was the good ol’ Scots who elevated its status to a ‘breakfast staple’, making all the other toppings feel unwanted and disrespected and wondering if they should start to make their Instagram page more racy and/or aesthetically pleasing to the masses.

I haven’t had marmalade in nearly 130 years. I first met marmalade down in old Moulin Rouge, strutting itself on the streets.  It’s one of those hard-to-find-a-good-one products that could really go either way. Sour, sweet, lots of peel, even more peel, please sir no peel, peel is not appealing. 


Anyway anyway, back to circa 2019. In the very best British spirit of Keeping Calm and Carrying On, I will continue my search for a non-disgusting Marmalade. So I bought some, in an effort to not judge a jar by it’s contents.
 
So I cooked some bread, in the traditional manner of toasting it in a toaster, favoured by many, and, lo and behold, I could not for the life of me open the darn jar of marmalade. And in the very best British spirit of Keeping Calm and Carrying On, I used vegemite instead. Vegemite never lets me down. And it has a positive, happy little vegemite attitude while it's at it, which is nice.

The next day I tried again with the marmalade jar, because I ain’t no quitter of opening marmalade jars. I used a knife, I tried to bang the lid open, I hired a forklift to wedge it open, I threw it off the Grand Canyon and watched it plunge 1,000 metres to the bottom of the Colorado River; but nothing worked. 

Downton Abbey marmalade??? Shut up and take my $$$

Day three, and I was not ready to throw in the towel. I was not going to be defeated by a jar of breakfast spread. I slaved and toiled over the opening of that bloody jar, day after day, year after year, and, finally, on the 15th year anniversary of trying to open the stupid thing, it popped open, like no-one had suffered in the opening of that jar. And you know what; it wasn’t the one for me, so I gave it to my dad, an unfussy marmalade consumer.

And to this day, the search for My Marmalade continues.