Why figs ain’t what they used to be

8:55am Tuesday 15th April 2008

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Bear with me, because this is going to be a rambler. Still there? Good. You might want to put your feet up with a cuppa and a biscuit while you read this.

So on Saturday the Daily Mail gave away a free DVD of one of my all-time favourite films, A Matter of Life and Death, in which David Niven plays a doomed wartime airman who has to fight a celestial court battle to prove he should not have been taken to the afterlife on account of the fact that a pretty communications officer had just fallen in love with him.

Now this sort of movie is what I like to refer to as a Hob Nob Special, because it's exactly the sort of film you want to watch while there's no-one else in the house on a rainy afternoon, with a pot of tea and a packet of Hob Nobs (milk or dark chocolate, I don't mind).

Hob Nob Specials are usually (but not exclusively) black and white and generally precede the early-to-mid Sixties, although Hitchcock always gets a pass no matter what year the film was made.

The correct conditions for watching the movie have not yet materialised, but in readiness for when they do I thought I'd better get myself some biscuits in.

Now, Hob Nob Specials do not necessarily have to involve actual Hob Nobs - any biscuit will do, though Hob Nobs have a curiously good resilience to being dangled in tea or coffee for slightly too long at tense or melodramatic moments in the movie.

I'm not sure where it came from, but on Saturday I had a sudden hankering for some fig rolls. It must be years since I had a fig roll - decades, even. But I could imagine them, the slightly curved biscuit holster with its ridged back, sheathing the sweet...sweet what? Was it actually figs in fig rolls? Could there still be mass-produced biscuits on sale in the UK that had figs as their unique selling point?

Suddenly, my mind was taken over by the thought of fig rolls. They surely fall into that category of Things That Would Never Be Invented Today. If someone went on The Apprentice or Dragon's Den with an idea for fig rolls they'd be laughed out of town.

Off I went to the Co-op, my excitement mounting at the prospect of fig rolls. Would they taste as I remembered them? Would they be smaller than they used to be, like Wagon Wheels? Did they, in fact, still make them?

I fairly ran to the biscuit aisle. Rich Tea... Arrowroot... Malted Milk... this was looking good. Ginger Nuts... Sports biscuits... Custard Creams... aaargh! They did sell fig rolls, but they were all gone! Was it possible that there'd actually been a run on fig rolls? Had my neighbours been possessed of the same madness that had infected me, and stocked up on them as though in readiness for some uncertain biscuity apocalypse?

So A Matter of Life and Death remains unwatched. The fig rolls remain unpurchased. But, while doing a bit of "research" (read surfing the net) for this column, I chanced upon a remarkable discovery.

Nicecupofteaandasitdown.com (no, really) is the perfect site for the Hob Nob Special fan. Not only do they exhaustively list biscuits ancient and modern, but they have a mission statement that reads: "Well I think we should all sit down and have a nice cup of tea, and some biscuits, nice ones mind you. Oh and some cake would be nice as well. Lovely."

Now if they would only branch out into TV film listings...