I’VE HAD a bee in my bonnet about Marmite for some time – so this week, I’ve been doing some reading up on it.

The idea that you “love it or hate it” is fatally flawed. I, and a few other people I have spoken to about it, don’t mind it. We don’t love it, but we certainly don’t despise it.

I mulled this theory over a bag of Twiglets, of which I consumed so many that my hand turned black, while some hours later I started sweating Marmite. If there was an infinite amount of Twiglets in the world, I would be happy.

But does that mean I “love” Marmite? No. Wholeheartedly not. My love of Twiglets does not mean I equally love the salty yeast extract that flavours them.

Incidentally, I discovered that after inserting a Twiglet into a cocktail sausage, I have created the ultimate finger food. Even better than the time I placed a Hula Hoop around a Pepperami and stacked them up. Try it, you’ll love it.

But yes, back to Marmite. You can be indifferent about it, as I am, and as a few people I know are, which means that “you love it or hate it” is false, and that the term something is a “bit Marmite” is null and void.

I have contacted Unilever, Marmite’s manufacturer, to let them know their slogan should be “you love, hate or are indifferent toward it”.

After a bit of Marmite-based Googling, I have discovered - I didn’t know before, so it’s a discovery, okay? – that Marmite was invented by accident.

The German scientist Justus von Liebig realised that yeast could be concentrated while carrying out another experiment. What was left in the barrel was a thick, black substance that became the Marmite we all either love, hate or are indifferent towards nowadays, which, Liebig surmised, could be bottled and consumed.

It has been claimed that Marmite won two world wars owing to the fact it was in British soldiers’ rations. Liebig, Munich born, would have choked on his Twiglets upon reading that factoid.

Now, let’s assume you either love or hate Marmite, and the grey area in between does not exist. That means there’s a 50 per cent chance that Marmite would not have been invented at all.

Why? Picture the scene. With curiosity getting the better of him, Liebig reaches into his barrel and helps himself to a fingerful of the black tar-like substance. He recoils in horror at what he tastes, spraying flecks of the yeasty leftovers all around.

Marmite would never exist. Twiglets would never exist. I would be two stones lighter.

ON A recent flirtation between a number of radio stations this week, I witnessed possibly the biggest disparity in radio audiences in the space of a minute.

On one rather loud commercial station, an excitable lady had texted into the studio to say she had bought five cinema tickets to see Fifty Shades of Grey, and that she was planning to watch them back to back on the day it came out.

Furious at such an idea – what if she hated the first showing? – I tuned into another station, where a softly-spoken middle-aged man was requesting a song for his wife and daughter who were going out for the evening.

“Off to see Fifty Shades of Grey?” the presenter asked. “No,” the gentleman replied. “They won’t be out late because she’s up early tomorrow to take part in the World Marmalade Festival,” before requesting Girls Want to Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper.

I think the two ladies’ idea of ‘fun’ might be slightly different.