So, I tend to quote a lot of British Comedy at people, right? By which I mean lines from TV shows and movies – stuff like Blackadder, Monty Python, Red Dwarf, The Young Ones, Bad News, etc. – as this was my peer group’s aggregate sense of humour, and we all enjoyed being able to come up with a line that we all knew which applied to a particular event or situation. I’m not really sure why. It had the unfortunate side effect of meaning whenever you said anything vaguely amusing in a voice that wasn’t your normal conversational tone people would assume it was from an episode they hadn’t seen or had forgotten, and ask “What was that from again?”.
One such example tends to rear its head whenever somebody’s about to go buy a packet of crisps (chips, for the antipodean crowd), and one’s preferred flavour hasn’t yet been established – I still do this, as well. It comes from a Young Ones episode, where Vyvyan goes to the bar to get a round in, and Neil asks for a packet of crisps (“only not meat flavoured crisps, because I don’t want to abuse my body and the world I live in”). Vyvyan’s response is to go up to the bar, and in the most typically obnoxious response he can muster he orders a packet of Roast Ox flavoured crisps. This, to someone who grew up in the 80s in Australia, is hilarious, as it is a well known fact that the only flavours of crisp available are Plain, Salt & Vinegar, Chicken, Cheese & Onion, and BBQ. English people seem to find it hard to comprehend that Prawn Cocktail wasn’t an option, however in fairness none of them tasted like the description, and probably only differed in the shade of artificial colouring and amount of MSG per bag. But it was brilliant – ROAST OX! What a concept?!
The phrase “roast ox” has even gone on to describe a particular phenomenon among me & some mates – you know when two people, without prior arrangement or rehearsal, say the exact same thing and it’s like you’ve momentarily shared a brain cell? Well based on Ryan & I blurting it out in the school library during an S.R.C. meeting in the early 90’s, we now describe that as a “roast ox moment”.
So you can probably understand why, in the front bar of The Barley Mow last Wednesday night, I nearly shat myself with disbelief when I saw these:
In order to verify the flavour, of course, I’m going to have to roast an ox for comparison.
I don’t have a point to make – I just thought it was kind of interesting.