The reason, claimed a weekend spokesperson, is that children no longer like marmalade, and discourage their parents from buying it. Nothing could be farther from the truth; but that is where the truth has been banished, because the spokesperson couldn’t speak it. Had he spoken it, a certain word would have been inescapably involved, and people would have come round to the spokesperson’s house and sprayed nasty things on it.

For the truth is that children never liked marmalade, but encouraged their parents to buy it. At least, they encouraged them to buy the top sellers, Robertson’s Golden Shred and Silver Shred, because of what the jars had on their labels. And here comes the word, albeit in a form designed to appease those who would otherwise reach for their aerosols and run straight round to The Times: what the jars had on their labels were g*ll*w*gs. They could be cut out by children who, when they had collected five of them, would send them off to Robertson’s and get back an enamel g*ll*w*g brooch.

There was a huge variety of enamel g*ll*w*gs. I myself had three: one held a cricket bat, one held a rifle, and one, dear God, actually held a banjo. I was quite young at the time, mind, as people of my age tended to be 60 years ago, and I pinned all three g*ll*w*gs on my Osidge Primary School blazer lapel, which is what people of my age did. David Collingwood had five, and when the rest of us saw him coming, we stepped aside. Respect meant something rather different, back then.

But none of us liked marmalade; we just forced it down pluckily, or threw the jars away when our mums weren’t looking, or, like Michael Ibbotson in 4a, shoplifted it from the Co-op, just for the labels. Robertson’s had struck a gold, and silver, seam. Until, of course, consciousness changed.

I have never fully understood why it did, because the g*ll*w*g was the best-loved stuffed toy ever. It may, I suppose, have been something to do with the last syllable, but you would be wrong to castigate it as w*g, since the word was invented in 1895 by an American author called Upton, who conflated it from God and pollywog. A pollywog is a tadpole. You know what God is. And together, they can’t half sell jamjars.

But if, to save marmalade, it is too late to bring the g*ll*w*g back, I see no reason why producers shouldn’t come up with new cross-culturally inclusive alternatives: little rabbis blowing bagpipes, say, little imams scaling maypoles, little popes on tricycles, and whatever else takes this or that sectarian fancy.

There should even be room for little ballerinas waving swastikas.

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