57 alleged varieties

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

9 February

If one of the breweries whose beer / ale you like started telling you that they once produced - but no longer produce - fifty-seven of anything, would you not, perhaps, feel short-changed by their range of six (or eight) in these modern times*?

And maybe fifty-seven doesn't just relate to soup, but to alphabetti spaghetti** (can you imagine such an abomination in Italy? though, if it did have real European currency, for some countries, such as Greece, a factory would have to produce the stuff in their own alphabet) - or was that a product of Crosse and Blackwell's***? - and baked beans, but I had always associated the claim with soup.

So how many soups are in the H---z range, and maybe I cannot rely on what the local Veran happens to stock - there must be a www.h---z.com to tell me...

Well, it's .co.uk, and clicking on soups takes me straight to Arsebook, which then offers general information and the circuity of a link back to .co.uk - such web-sites, which aren't any more navigable than many a river, are just not looking at for me to find evidence, not even of these (former) possible soups:

* Tobacco and Coriander

* Cream of Mouse

* Lamb and Beetroot (sure some Polish influence there!)

* Smoked Halibut and Rye

* Dust and Cobweb


In fact, I shall start a - wholly notional - series of detective novels called The Apsley Papers, with a suitably enticing range of 57 sub-titles, and list them all on your favourite retailing site(s):

The Apsley Papers: Remains found in a Gravel-Pit

The Apsley Papers: Killed by a Strontium Nitrate Spoon

The Apsley Papers: Impact of a Club


Then, I just wait for the orders to roll in, and produce copies to meet them - all very supply-and-demand led, all very last minute!


End-notes

* Oh, Chaplin again! A well-known pinko, of course, as the committee told us - see more here.

** Why do I not remember seriously making words with that stuff, not even not rude ones?

*** If they ever existed.


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