Snack bars galore: the marvel of football cuisine
A Thursday morning in July and tourists gather in front of the birthplace of the Patron Saint of Football Snack Bars. There are seven such visitors in all – a family of four, a pair of tanned pensioners and a lonely woman wearing a flowered bucket hat. She ponders a piece of paper, the family point to phone screens and bicker like hungry chickens, and the couple struggle to open an umbrella as if figuring out how to put together an AK-47 rifle for the first time. It's gently exciting to find these followers of our game's culture here, outside 29 Main Street, Roslin, in Midlothian. They too must have come to see where John Lawson Johnston, genius inventor of Bovril, was born.
Except they don't seem very interested in the plate who carries his name . Then all seven wander absently away, and I realize they're looking for the chapel: Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code, Knights Templar and all that. This is the wrong kind of holy grail.
< /figure>Number 29 is a quietly handsome sandstone cottage with dormer windows protruding from its roof like frog eyes. This plaque - above and to the right of the front door, the mole of this house - proclaims Johnston's birth here, in 1839, a...
A Thursday morning in July and tourists gather in front of the birthplace of the Patron Saint of Football Snack Bars. There are seven such visitors in all – a family of four, a pair of tanned pensioners and a lonely woman wearing a flowered bucket hat. She ponders a piece of paper, the family point to phone screens and bicker like hungry chickens, and the couple struggle to open an umbrella as if figuring out how to put together an AK-47 rifle for the first time. It's gently exciting to find these followers of our game's culture here, outside 29 Main Street, Roslin, in Midlothian. They too must have come to see where John Lawson Johnston, genius inventor of Bovril, was born.
Except they don't seem very interested in the plate who carries his name . Then all seven wander absently away, and I realize they're looking for the chapel: Tom Hanks, The Da Vinci Code, Knights Templar and all that. This is the wrong kind of holy grail.
< /figure>Number 29 is a quietly handsome sandstone cottage with dormer windows protruding from its roof like frog eyes. This plaque - above and to the right of the front door, the mole of this house - proclaims Johnston's birth here, in 1839, a...
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