Love it or Hate it

The worst effect of Brexit (or the vote to leave the European Union, as I prefer to call it because Brexit is a stupid made up word that reporters and politicians mispronounce as bregsit) so far, is that it caused Tesco to remove Marmite from it's online sales for less than 24 hours. Not the fact that it has given licence to racists to shout abuse at strangers in the street, or the fact that it has divided families, or caused the pound to drop to it's lowest level since 1985, or made Boris 'Papua New Guinea style of orgies' Johnson Foreign Secretary, or caused a severe outbreak of tautologitis (I know.  I made that word up, but.....Brexit means Brexit)  No, it's the yeasty stuff that has caused old men to ring into radio shows in tears apologising to their 13 year old sons for stupidly voting to leave the EU.  

No one realised.  It never occurred to them that something as British as Marmite would be affected by a change in the trading relationship with the rest of Europe.  It's almost like being at war.  We knew those bloomin' foreigners couldn't be trusted.  Baton down the hatches, pull up the drawbridge, stockpile your favourites.  Is grandad's gas mask still in the loft?

My Grandmother never recovered from the war.  It wasn't the bombing, or the young men that were killed in droves, or the German Prisoners of war that she cooked for but the lack of sweetness in her life. To the day she died she had a larder full of sugar and she was never going to be without decent cake again.  I can understand that.  We would all really miss sugar.  If Brexit meant that we couldn't have sugar the 58% would probably be strung up.  However, Marmite isn't really like sugar.  A clever advertising campaign came up with the 'love it or hate it' slogan, forcing people to choose and Britain divided into those who couldn't stand it and those that couldn't live without it.  I guess it was probably 58/42 in favour of the brown spread.  

Truthfully though, Marmite is nothing like sugar.  Even people who like it can go for days, weeks or even years without eating it. It lasts forever and you can always seem to scrape a little more out of an empty pot. It's a spectrum; like many things. Society likes the binary choice. Dog person/cat person? Introvert/extrovert? Trump or Hillary: which one is good or bad? In or out of the EU? Masculine or feminine?  The problem with this is that once someone has made their choice they instantly think that everyone should agree with them and anyone who doesn't is a bad or horrible person.  

A comedian fell foul of this kind of thinking on Twitter today.  He tweeted that Brexit was like Marmite and someone replied that he was a weak-kneed hippy.  Whatever you feel about Marmite, it made Twitter a great place to hang out today if you like a laugh.

These were two of my favourites.

Who knew that hitting the Brexit button would also pull the Unilever?

I'm like Marmite, in the fact that I can only be found in Waitrose and my family hates me.