Taking The Biscuit

Coincidence and fortuity are natural phenomena, and in the way these things occur – by surprise – both did so today.

A good friend rang this morning to chew the proverbial, but he also talked about having just bought another Cracker album, a recent one, and he enthused about their '93 album Kerosene Hat, at which point I talked about the coincidence of only yesterday writing about influential and rejuvenating rock bands of the early 90s, of which KH would be a solid representative.

So a little later, and only a few moments ago, I decided to research that album and the band's first eponymous one which I don’t know that well. When typing ‘cracker’ into a search engine it is no surprise that the foodstuff rather than band came top of the list [along with the TV programme....]. What also got presented was the ‘graham’ cracker: search engines being clever in their plethora of prediction and suggestion. Now for years – not consistently throughout the full 45 I have lived in England – I have had occasion to refer to and then need to explain to people here exactly what a graham cracker is. My memory of such is as a child in America and being given these with a glass of milk at nursery or kindergarten school. I know we also used to have them at home and I loved them, as kids do, because they were sweet. But I have always wondered why you couldn’t get them here, and why the only English cracker was what we called a ‘soda’ cracker in the States.

graham

Well, praise be to research, and the apocalyptic moment that has taken all of 45 years – though, as I say, not a daily intense search and scrutiny for the answer – but I discovered just a short while ago that the English equivalent to the graham cracker is of course [drum roll] the digestive biscuit!

digestive

Fucking simple, when you think about it.

For 45 years, what should have been the easiest of extrapolations has been thwarted by the difference in nomenclature – graham rather than digestive; cracker rather than biscuit - and the simpler difference in shape – rectangular rather than circular.  A fortuitous discovery, if ridiculously belated, but I am enlightened, and relieved.

More on the band later.