So, Lyle’s Golden Syrup has unveiled its first major brand overhaul in more than 140 years, which is roughly how long Under The Counter has been wearing the same tatty old cardigan for.
This, apparently, is a Guinness World Record. The unchanged branding, that is, not the Auld Boy’s dogged determination to avoid shelling out on new clobber. As records go, it’s not exactly up there with most spears caught from a spear gun underwater in one minute (14) but hey ho, we can’t all be Ashrita Furman, who also holds the world record for most world records held (more than 200, all of them pointless).
However, if there was a record for most disturbing branding then Lyle’s could probably lay a decent claim to that. Like most people, UTC had never noticed that its tins of Golden Syrup have spent almost a century and a half adorned with a dead lion surrounded by a swarm of bees.
This, along with an accompanying quote from the Bible, probably made sense back in the black and white days of Queen Victoria. Now it just seems a bit… minging.
Despite having a notoriously sweet tooth, the Auld Boy was never a fan of Golden Syrup anyway – once opened, the tin was always far too sticky for OCD UTC to go near. And, when he clocked that its Sunday name was the distinctly unappetising ‘partially inverted refiners syrup’ he thought that, on reflection, he’d probably rather eat a dead lion.
