The battle is really hotting up over here. Never mind all of that Saturday night twaddle about whether XFactor or Strictly Come Dancing got the highest ratings – although by my calculation there must be a lot of empty restaurants and Saturday night ‘venues’ around in these weeks leading up to Christmas.
No the REAL battle is over a couple of thick, brownish-black gloopy substances, Vegemite and Marmite.
But I digress…
I do remember supermarkets making a short-lived effort to stock this supposed British staple – like it or not, they stopped stocking it because NO-ONE BOUGHT IT! And no-one bought it because NO-ONE LIKED IT!
I suspect that Vegemite has had a reasonable showing in British supermarkets (and probably more so in the Greater London ones) because about 400,000 Aussies set up camp here and wanted some home comforts…and were prepared to be impolite enough (we call this being direct) to ask why it wasn’t stocked anywhere. And supermarkets, being what they are and hating to miss a money-making opportunity, put the smallest, most cost-ineffective jars on their shelves. And we then proceeded to indoctrinate partners, wives, husbands, children and anyone who sat at our breakfast table to the Antipodean delights of Vegemite on toast as the ULTIMATE morning-after-the-night-before cure. So we all went to the supermarket or the Australia Shop or harangued fellow travellers coming from our great brown land to get us some more so that we could put ‘a rose in every cheek’ possible.
I don’t remember anything like this happening for Marmite in Australia…
I rest my case.
Gidday from the UK 