The Getaway

‘AS we read that before his arrest Mark Thatcher was planning to leave South Africa for a life in Dallas, we realise that so much in life is about timing.

That’s the way the cookie crumbles

Had Maggie’s boy managed to make it to the USA, he’d not now be at the centre of a police investigation and facing a possible 15 years in jail.

And what goes for the man accused of working to finance an alleged coup to topple the regime in Equatorial Guinea also goes for the thousands of us wanting to make the most of this Bank Holiday weekend.

We can see the Guardian’s map of where travel problems are likely to occur but, unless we headed off last June, chances are high that we’ll be spending many hours stuck in a hermetically sealed stationary train or an overstuffed Mondeo.

But today we can say that there is now one thing that will no longer be left to chance.

Thanks to Waitrose Food International, we know which biscuits last longest when dunked into a cup of hot tea.

No more need to dice with danger as we guess the optimum moment to remove our saturated Garibaldi from a brew.

Get it right and it’s delicious, melt-in-your mouth treat; get in wrong and your brownish cuppa looks like the product of a high velocity colonic irrigation.

But before the result is known, there’s time a few words from WFI’s William Sitwell, the boffin that has placed Britain once more at the vanguard of world science.

‘As well as relatively straightforward physical tests,’ says our man with a kettle, ‘we needed to establish the mean duration of the individual dunk episode of the average Briton.’

Before your head spins clean off its shoulders, just know that this test involves seeing how long it took for each biscuit type to wholly dissolve in tea.

And know too that the Waitrose team was ‘startled’ by the robustness of some biscuits, especially the Giant Finger, which lasted a full hour before falling apart.

But when taking flavour into account, the Giant Finger performed poorly. And the official best biscuit to dunk into your tea is…the…ginger nut.

‘The classic dunker, with the ginger becoming more gingery while the biscuit holds its crunch,’ says the paper. ‘Dunk for 2.92 seconds.’

With that cleared up, all that’s left is to work out how long it will take to get to the seaside at a rate of two miles per hour (or five yards per ginger nut).

The answer? A very long time if Mark Thatcher’s navigating…’

Posted: 27th, August 2004 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink