Jaffas

A Jaffa, to an Australian, is a lolly (candy) consisting of a chocolate centre covered with a hard orange flavoured sugar shell and coloured reddish orange. I just went looking for a link and discover that the word is used in Britain to denote a cake/biscuit with orange jelly filling so it seems we might have nicked the idea from the poms and improved on it.

Opinions vary about the best way to eat a Jaffa in Australia. Some grab em by the handful and chew em but I maintain it's better to pop one or two at a time into your gob and suck em slowly. You get that orange flavour to start with but eventually that hard shell cracks and you get a blast of almost liquid chocolate (it's almost liquid from your own body heat). Marvellous!

It used to be the tradition, back in the days when movie theatres didn't have carpetted floors, for urchins such as myself to take three or four Jaffas and roll em down the aisle. They made a satisfactorily rattly sound. One usually waited until a particularly dramatic or mushy moment in the movie.

On December 26th 1979 Sue and I were at the Valhalla Cinema, at that time on Bridge Road Richmond. A stinking hot day and no air conditioning. It was a Marx Brothers marathon; 7 or 8 Marx Brothers movies in a row. We were in the midst of The Big Store[^] when Tony Martin[^] launched into yet another tiresome song. This was about the sixth movie of the marathon and the audience heaved a quite audible sigh when that song started. And some wag at the back of the theatre launched some Jaffas upon the floor. The entire audience literally roared with laughter and applauded. It would have been worth a thousand Jaffas to have been the one who thought of it!