Dear Reader,
William Macdonald founded Macdonald Biscuits in Glasgow in 1828. After seeing some biscuits from Antwerp, Belgium, he was inspired to create a chocolate covered biscuit with a chocolate cream sandwich in the centre.
They were first produced in 1932 and became a McVities product a few years after Macdonald was taken over by United biscuits in 1965. Each wrapper has a joke or 'funny fact' printed on it and imaginative, often humorous designs featuring penguins that often pastiche famous works of art.
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I think the biscuits are delicious and perfect on a picnic.
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From Francis Kilvert September 6th 1875 in Wiltshire
'The morning suddenly became glorious and we saw what had happened in the night. All night long millions of samarium spiders had been spinning and the whole country was covered .....The gossamer webs gleamed and twinkled into crimson and gold and green, like the most exquisite shot-silk dress in the finest texture of gauzy silver wire. I never saw anything like it or anything so exquisite as 'the Virgin's webs' glowed with changing opal lights and glanced with all the colours of the rainbow. At 4 o'clock Miss Meredith Brown and her beautiful sister Etty came over to afternoon tea with us and a game of croquet.
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Small moments of warmth I remember a little warmth, Joey trotting the family through Norfolk lanes, the small yellow trap swaying in the sunshine. I remember picnics on Yarmouth beach with enough blue sky ‘to make a sailor’s trouser’. We ate cucumber sandwiches, Penguin biscuits. I remember dark evenings, the small warm flame from a Tilly lamp lighting the kitchen, and sometimes for supper we had chicken, chocolate mousse. I remember a warm holiday in France squeezed into the back of a car, singing old thirties love songs. But will these small moments of warmth, at the end, be enough to heat and split the heavy stones that circle the human heart, allow salt tears to trickle through the cracks? * With very best wishes, Patricia
