Alex Hutchinson
LightNews LightNews
banner
alexthearchivist.com
Alex Hutchinson
@alexthearchivist.com
1.9K followers 630 following 210 posts
Chocolate historian, author, broadcaster, archivist.

Formerly the archivist at Nestle.co.uk, but now archiving at YorkshireTea.co.uk

Published: HarperCollins.co.uk

Rep'd: knightayton.co.uk

Trustee: yorkliteraturefestival.co.uk

Or: alexthearchivist.com
Posts Replies Media Videos
alexthearchivist.com
Yes, my Christmas tree is still up. Thanks for asking.
A three foot live fir tree (or is it a spruce?) which I got in a pot in Lidl at the end of November 2024. In the icy cold of my living room the tree has thrived. I've taken down the Christmas decorations, but left up a string of warm white lights. It is sitting on a box in front of a set of bookshelves which are home to the complete works of Charles Dickens, whose writing I love, but whose life I despair of.
February 16, 2025 at 11:15 AM
alexthearchivist.com
Happy Cheesemas to all who celebrate.
A barrel of KP Cheese Footballs photographed in front of a real Christmas tree decorated with plumb coloured strings of beads, lights, and a a string of oak leaves. In the top corner of the photo is a glimpse of some hardback Dickens novels on a bookshelf. I bet Dickens would have loved Cheese Footballs. They really are the meaning of Christmas.
December 24, 2024 at 11:45 AM
alexthearchivist.com
Someone sent me this and apart from being in awe of whoever made the costumes, I'm also very impressed they stayed brand-consistent and did create an implausible mash-up of competitor products.
A photo taken outdoors on a winter day on a large paved driveway. It appears at first to be a Christmas selection pack of chocolate bars in a plastic, stocking-shaped net, with a purple card tag at the top displaying the use-by date and a cartoon illustration of Santa. However, when you zoom into the image you realise all the chocolate bars (there are twelve of them) have heads and feet. You are in fact looking at a dozen grown men who have created chocolate wrapper dresses to go over their clothes, sporting the exact brand logos of the most popular Cadbury bars. The men are lying on the ground with their legs together and arms by their sides in a Christmas stocking-shaped formation and someone has covered them with a big fishing net and added a giant card tag. This is astonishing. The work that went into this! I'm in awe! Someone, somewhere deserves an A Level in at at minimum. Possibly the Turner Prize. Something has gone wrong with the scrolling on the alt text box (it always does) so I can't scroll up to proof read. I hope I don't have any whopping typos.
December 15, 2024 at 9:24 AM
alexthearchivist.com
I realise it had absolutely nothing at all to do with your amusing satirical thread 😬🤦🏻‍♀️😬🤦🏻‍♀️ but ranting about chocolate quality is my religion and we are in the end times. The mark of the beast is a cocoa solids content of less than 35%! Wake up sheeple!
A photograph taken at the corner of Petergate in the city of York in 2015. A man gives out home-made flyers from a lectern on wheels which is covered in homemade banners which read, "ALMOST THERE NOW", "OBEY GOD IF YOU WANT TO LIVE", "THE IDIOT'S GUIDE TO THE END OF THE WORLD", "ALMOST THERE NOW". When I took this photo I was rather smug about not believing any of it, but the following year was the rapture in which David Bowie, Alan Rickman, and Victoria Wood were all taken from us. Trump was elected president, then we had BoJo in No. 10, a worldwide pandemic, the sea caught fire... It just never ends, does it? I thought the apocalypse would be quick, but this is awful. Have you seen the price of arabica coffee? And don't even get me started on petrol! How am I supposed to ignite my giant wicker offerings to the Elder Gods if I can't get hold of a jerry can of four star? The favour of the deities isn't going to be bestowed on those who use unleaded, is it? The whole thing's just a nightmare if you ask me. And whatever you do, don't touch bread if it's moist; you can thank me for that one later.
December 13, 2024 at 12:08 PM
alexthearchivist.com
For those of you following the story of the lost Roman tiles from the chocolate village, I've found the photos I took in Weston Park Museum which show🥁🥁🥁... The footprints of the little dog! Starting to wonder if the stiletto was just in the written report...🤦🏻‍♀️
A photograph of a Roman roof tile with four little dog paw prints pressed into the terracotta before firing, alongside the stamp of the VIth legion. The roof tile is in a glass display case with (as I had remembered it) a red background. However, the tile itself is utterly different to the one I remembered and I realise I've seen a black and white photo somewhere of another tile and two amphora which were damaged but glued back together. Now where did *those* go?! Museum didactic (fancy word for interpretive sign) which reads: "F is for Footprints Roof tile Ceramic Romano-British 80-400AD Found near York, North Yorkshire The footprints on this tile show that a dog ran across it the day before the clay was fired! The tile is also marked with a military stamp of the Sixth Legion (Legio VI Victrix) Which accompanied the emperor Hadrian on his trip to Britain and replaced the Ninth Legion at York during 122 AD." But hang on a minute, does this really look like the dog was running? It's feet are together. Surely that means someone placed it there to make the marks...
December 12, 2024 at 5:13 PM
alexthearchivist.com
Would you accept this extract from my first book as evidence of my love for the colon?
A page from a paperback novel reads: 'She had run heedlessly through the ice and frozen mud, skidding dangerously and often, until she reached the police sub-station at the Burnley road junction just minutes away. 'The satellite station had been closed when she arrived, and above the door of the squat little Edwardian building was a warning carved in stone in a language she didn't speak: ignorantia legis excusat neminem, ignorance of the law excuses no-one.' This was from the first novel I ever had published. I think it was from an event which was happening in flashback but I've got no idea, really. I wrote the whole thing myself -- no ghostwriters or anything -- which is why it's such a mad chaos of implausible things held together by a misunderstanding of basic physics and local geography.
November 28, 2024 at 11:50 AM
alexthearchivist.com
Show me a picture on your phone that has your energy that isn’t a selfie.
An Edwardian colour postcard of a cartoon showing a woman in a white blouse, red skirt, and red hat. She is standing on a pavement where she was evidently going about her business quite peacefully until she had to turn around and beat back a bird with her red folded up umbrella. The bird is a large stork, and it has a sling of blue fabric around it's neck which holds a wriggling, naked baby. The stork is trying to deliver the baby to the woman and the woman is beating the stork with her umbrella (but missing the baby who is fine). The line of text at the bottom of the postcard reads, "AND THE VILLAIN STILL PURSUES HER."
November 27, 2024 at 5:24 PM
alexthearchivist.com
'The Tear' is haunting me. I can't stop thinking about it. The artist has taken away the one thing everyone remembers about Vermeer's original - a teardrop pearl - and transformed it into a heartbreak which watches you from every angle. Knowing the artist's circumstances takes my breath away.
A painting by Johannes Vermeer (painted around 1665) entitled, 'Girl wth a pearl earring'. The girl in question is wearing an oversized ochre silk garment around her shoulders with a brilliant white collar poking out at the top. Her hair is concealed by a turban of sky blue fabric wrapped around her hairline, with a knot of cream fabric at her crown which cascades from there down the back of her neck. Her expression is almost a smile, but not quite. Her mouth is open and her bottom lip appears lightly moist. She looks out of the painting over her left shoulder. The eye of the viewer is drawn to her left earlobe where a large teardrop-shaped pearl gleams, caught by a little daylight. I remember the moment in the 2003 film of the same name where this image was recreated by Scarlett Johansson. I saw it in the cinema that year, and I heard fellow audience members gasp at the sight. I was an undergraduate at the time and I remember my fellow students writing endless short stories inspired by the Tracy Chevalier book on which the film was based. It seemed to grip everyone, like the fever of the 90s when everyone was raving about Captain Corelli's Mandolin. I wonder what my students would think of these books now. Or the painting for that matter. In a world burning beneath climate change, polluted by post-truth political movements, do the works of the old masters have anything to say to Generation Alpha?
November 23, 2024 at 12:24 PM
alexthearchivist.com
🤣 Well that's a hilarious typo.

They didn't have deep-fried Mars Bars in my day! These newfangled inventions...

I'm nostalgic for the epic Christmas windows in Lewis's department store, among many other things.
Me, aged two and a half, wearing a tweed coat with a black velvet collar (where in god's name did I get that?!) looking into the window of Lewis's department store in Glasgow, while my Grandma Mary looks at me. In the window is a display of Tiny Tears dolls having a tea party at a big table laid out with tea cups, food, and wrapped gifts. The dolls are holding balloons and clambering over the table. My grandma was desperate to buy me a tiny tears doll for Christmas that year, but I only wanted A-Team action figurines because I was so obsessed with the A-Team I would only answer to the name of Mr T. That year Lewis's also had a window full of animatronic dogs.
November 22, 2024 at 4:27 PM
alexthearchivist.com
Hello! How lovely! I haven't been to Saltburn since 2019, but last time I was there I saw this bookshop and it made me feel so sad because it's always rather heartbreaking to see a bookshop close. I'm so glad Saltburn has another independent book seller 🌞
The window of an abandoned bookshop where a book has slipped off it's stand and everything has faded. The shop window outside "Saltburn Bookshop". The window frame is late Victorian and covered in patchy, peeling yellow paint in various shades. The books in the window have been there for many years; their covers have faded in the sun and their jackets have curled with age or damp, or both. It is an abandoned bookshop in need of love. It's the sort of thing a busy young woman in the city with a high powered job in a law firm would discover that her great uncle (who she'd never met because of the family feud and *that* scandal) had left to her in his will. And then she'd have to take a leave of absence from work and tell her aggressively assertive boyfriend to pause his marriage proposal while she went down there to pack it all up ready for it to be sold to McConstruction Ltd for luxury flats. But then her new neighbour nextdoor to the old bookshop, the boyishly handsome and rather shy bakery owner, would accidentally spill hot brioche dough in her path one morning and she'd get a terrible brioche injury on her shins, and the kindly village GP (who is inexplicably always around for a consult anyway, you don't have to ring up) would order her to bed rest for a week and she'd be really angry about it because she's a busy city girl who needs to pack up and ship out, but then the whole community would pull together to bring her hot dinners and sudoku books, and a puppy while she recovers. And all this would make her realise that actually what the community really needs during these difficult times is an independent bookshop and she'd agree to stay on just long enough to see if there was another buyer who could turn the place around, bring in some stock, maybe fit a Victoria Arduino White Eagle coffee machine. But then it would turn out her great uncle had another will! And
November 21, 2024 at 7:06 PM
alexthearchivist.com
My Mortier Pilon crock with rainbow kraut. You can't see the lid, but it has the same rim for a water air lock. It's only 5L so would take up less room than the one you saw in Germany. They also do a 2L.
A glass fermentation crock with layers of shredded cabbage.
November 19, 2024 at 1:18 PM