Tales Of The Gurrier

This story on the BBC about the Biscuit city,

Thousands of biscuits and sweets are being used to build a cityscape in a London department store.

The installation by Chinese artist Song Dong, 40, depicts a traditional Asian city linked to a more modern city complete with stadium and church.

Selfridges’ customers can tuck in once the work is finished on Wednesday.

‘Eating the City’ was built to highlight Mr Dong’s concerns over the current development of cities in Asia which he says all look the same.

,.put me in mind of an odd discussion I had with my compatriots on a related topic the highlights of which I present to you here so that it may be preserved for future generations as a warning. Get outside and do something useful with your lives!

DONAL:
If a planet were ruled and populated entirely by biscuits which ones would be in charge?

To get the Wagon Wheel rolling I will venture the natural order would be some form of biscuit centred national socialism. If digestives were the footsoldiers, Hobnobs the SS and of course Viscounts would be the officer class. See them rounding up the flagrantly homosexual Mikados and packing them off in crates to the dreaded ‘Dunking Camps’. Resistance would be led by the flint hard Ginger Nuts and Garibaldis. They would stage daring raids on the Dunkel Camps always on the look out for the dastardly, spineless collaborators, that scum of the biscuit bourgeoisie the Custard Creams.

Or perhaps biscuit Communism based on the Chinese model is the way forward. Yet I feel that a primarily carbohydrate based lifeform like an animated biscuit would seek some form of unifying credo to explain its place in the world hence the biscuit facism.

On the other hand since none of their scientists could explain how a planet populated entirely by beings made up of wheat sugar and flour could have evolved through any form of biological evolution of the species it stands to reason a form of Intelligent Biscuit Design theory would emerge. Biscuit Creationism and the belief that some biscuits are created more equal than others, especially those with tasty fillings. For on those chosen ones the Great Designer must have laboured long and hard. This would give rise to the neobiscuit fascism and later in reaction to this the ‘All Biscuits Equal under the Tin’ movement and ‘One Biscuit one Dunk’.

There would of course be many religious movements on our biscuit world. I would favour a form of Biscuit Buddhism where the Rich Tea can aspire to be reborn in the next life as a Digestive and so on up the great biscuit shelf of karma where eventually some form of crumbly Nirvana is achieved said biscuit dissolves into a lake of tea to join all the other biscuity souls for eternity.

Send me your biscuity visions.

ELIMARE:

I’ll go for a consumer driven capitalist planet:

The Plain Digestives and Marietta’s are the homeless of the world. They die soggy and unloved, dissolving into mush on the rain-slicked city streets. Nobody notices. The Chocolate Digestives and Hob Nobs make up the blue collar class, their bodies crumbling under the weight of their toil. These are the farmers, the factory workers, the plebs. Cadbury fingers make up the armed forces, although having no natural enemies they have very little to do except hang around street corners trying to score with local jaffa cakes - cheap biscuits who look pretty at first glance, but hide a nasty surprise. Bourbon Creams make up the middle class. Shortbread biscuits are the aristocracy, they are stiff and solid, inflexible to change. Fig rolls are the police - no one knows where they come from or who they are. Shadowy figures who linger in doorways and always seem to be one step ahead of the criminal classes, those biscuits that are half-breeds, the kit-kats and penguins of the world.

In the media the pink wafers would rule. Even in a biscuit based world the ‘pink pound’ is an important economic factor. However they work in the background, enabling the flashier biscuits - the biscotti wrapped in their gold lame outfits, and cadbury luxury chocolate covered biscuits to become the performers and stars of the planet.

The madelaines and ladyfingers are the euro-trash of Cookiewood, their buttery French accents mixing harshly with the loud and abrasive Toll-house movie producer cookies. Big and brash these cookies are often seen in the cookiehouses accompanied by soft little macaroons in their coconut dresses.

The Sciences would be for those of the cracker variety. Jacob’s Cream Crackers being the perfect logical specimen, their geometric shape lending naturally towards the hard sciences (chemistry in particular.) also involved in hard sciences would be Tuc crackers, specialists in Mathematics and Physics, they gather in groups of 12, which gathering is known as the doTucahedron, in this way they have identified the physical laws of the universe. Ritz crackers would be the star-gazers of the planet, the astronomers and astronauts. Their perfectly disc-shaped bodies a mirror to the planets they study off-world.

Soft sciences (psychology, sociology, etc) would be championed by the less aggressive crackers, Carr’s Water Biscuits for instance. Their delicate psyches shaped by the Master Baker’s hands, they strive each day to prove themselves as good as the hard scientists, however they are not made of as such stern dough, and tend to crumble easily when confronted.

At the top of the heap is the unholy trinity of ‘Kimberly-Mikado- and Coconut Cream’ who rule the planet in a revolving majority government. Kimberly is the strongest of the three, and Mikado and Coconut cream vie for second place, however together they are unbeatable.

ISSY:

I see a society much like England is although nobody will admit to - full of different classes.

The ruling royal family is of course, Duchy Original shortbread, with minor royals being of the highland variety. Harry’s parentage is hard to establish, wrapped as he is in Duchy packaging. There’s just something about his texture that doesn’t look quite right,

The upper class are chocolate coated - the polo playing orange clubs, hunting fruit clubs, sloane ranger classic bars and of course, the rich and lazy mint viscounts - all shiny wrappers and posh insides - there’s not a days work in any of them.

Landed gentry are chocolate covered hob nobs, the chocolate distinguishing them from the hard working farmer regular hob nobs.

Noveaux riche are jaffa cakes, their chocolate topping giving the impression of wealth and dignity, but orange jelly filling and sponge base betraying their true standing.

Middle class tennis clubs are filled with pink wafers, nice biscuits, iced gems - all pleasant and ineffectual - the Tim Henmans of the biscuit world. We struggle at Wimbledon, our pink wafers going up against the chocolate chip cookies of the Americans, and the hard, sugarless Russian rusks.

The working classes are a big mixed up packet - the daily mail reading custard creams feeling threatened by the bourbons, the jammy dodgers trying to put a happy face on it, all lead by the smarmy politicians - the crunch creams - they look like custard creams superficially, but they know they’re much, much better.

Fig rolls are the fat yet undernourished teenagers, spending their days playing playstation and not getting any exercise - with no muscle on them the only thing holding their squidgy insides in is their crusty skin, which sometimes has a greasy spotty sheen to it.

Religions would naturally be tea-based, the dominant western religions appearing remarkably similar to outsiders, only those in the know able to differentiate between the superiority of the gold label, the timidity of the English breakfast, and the self loathing of the green label.

Eastern philosophies come down to the clean, simple green tea: this is a tea best accompanied by plain biscuits who have shrugged off the bourgeois accoutrements of the modern world such as chocolate and cream fillings.

Early grey has a large following in the entertainment industry, where the yellow thread worn on the biscuit (symbolising the bergamot) must now be digitally removed from feature films.

Home made oat based biscuits don’t really hold with religion, feeling that the earth should be worshipped, and feel that fruit infusions are the way forward.
Occasionally rumours appear of dark cults filled with cafe noir biscuits, worshipping coffee and sacrificing each other.

My thanks to Issy and Elimare for lending their enormous talents to this important topic and to the Selfridges for having the courage to realize one man’s impossible dream to walk with the biscuits.

For more on biscuits I recommend A nice cup of tea and a sit down.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006 at 5:37 am and is filed under Bloggery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.