In the dying days of 2010 I took on my first - and, to date last - freelance shift job in a small newsroom. It was probably the least successful appointment of my career, and I spent my short tenure sitting next to someone who kept pristine empty jars of Tiptree 'Old Times' Orange Marmalade on his desk. He loved marmalade so much he not only went through a jar a week but couldn’t bear to part with the vestibule in which it arrived afterwards.
I’ve never bought a jar of marmalade and I’ve never made a batch myself. Both of these things are privileges in themselves, because I love marmalade. These three facts are connected in a sticky orange cycle: I have grown up eating marmalade made by other people, therefore I love marmalade, therefore people give me it, and so it continues.
Marmalade in childhood as being made by my grandfather in a striped red apron. Marmalade in adolescence as coming from jars with labels printed by my mother, slathered onto bread charred between the jaws of a toasting rack on the Aga, so that melted butter and viscous sugar pooled in the dents between the tiny quilted grid imprinted on the bread. A breakfast snack, an after-school snack, a before-the-pub-shift snack. Marmalade as a student in cold kitchens after a night out, shivering and giddy and tasting like home and new all at once. Marmalade as an adult in the pantry cupboard, snuck into weekend bags by friends and left on the worktop after dinner, named after the homes it came from: Mayamalade. MarlowMarms.