Riddles

In 1984, Nick Kershaw’s The Riddle was in the charts - a mysterious, catchy song full of apparently profound but entirely nonsensical lyrics. It reached number three in the UK, and listeners tied themselves in knots trying to decode it. Only later did Kershaw admit, somewhat sheepishly, that the words were placeholders, never meant to mean anything. He couldn’t say so at the time, he said, because people would have been furious - they wanted a riddle. They needed to believe that the nonsense had purpose.

Some years later, my friend James decided to test human intelligence at a house party. He was the kind of boy who read philosophy before breakfast and corrected people’s pronunciation of Nietzsche. Everyone else was in the usual teenage fog of weed smoke and bad decisions, raiding the parents’ drink cabinet and mixing Baileys with Chambord, Sheridan’s and Frangelico until everything turned the colour of dishwater.

James walked over to a group arguing about something political - socialism or the Smiths, it was hard to tell - and placed a few items on the coffee table: two blocks of wood, a piece of string, and a curtain ring.

“Figure this one out,” he said, and walked off.

The group, half-drunk and wholly earnest, stared at the objects. Someone said, “I think I’ve got it!” and then, after a pause, “No, wait.” They spent what felt like fifteen minutes rearranging them in various configurations, trying to divine the hidden meaning. Of course, there wasn’t one. That was the joke. James didn’t make any new friends that night, but I remember thinking it was brilliant - the way he’d occupied their minds with nothing at all. The riddle wasn’t in the objects; it was in the people trying to solve them.

That memory comes back to me when I remember Lyle’s Golden Syrup. My grandmother always kept one in her pantry, next to its darker cousin, the black treacle. As a child, I would stare at the picture on the front: a dead lion, bees swarming from its carcass, the words “Out of the strong came forth sweetness.” I didn’t understand it then, but I knew it was important - a secret message for grown-ups.

Only later did I learn the story. Abram Lyle, a man of strong religious conviction, had chosen a scene from the Old Testament: Samson kills a lion, and later, finding a hive of bees in its corpse, turns it into a riddle. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.” It’s one of those strange biblical paradoxes - that something dead could give rise to something delicious.

In 2024, Lyle’s redesigned their packaging. The lion now looks healthy, glossy, and very much alive. The bees are gone, the riddle gone with them. According to their brand director, the company needed to “move with the times” - a “fresh, contemporary design” that would “appeal to the everyday British household.” In other words, they didn’t want a dead lion on the breakfast table.

I find that oddly sad. It feels like another small act in the great modern project of sanitisation - the endless smoothing over of anything unsettling or strange. Heaven forbid a child should ask why the lion isn’t breathing. Death is off-brand.

But isn’t that the point? That life and death coexist. That the sweetness could be even more cherished because one day we won't be around to taste it anymore.

My father, with his dry humour, used to tell me a riddle of his own:

“What has four legs and flies?”

A dead horse.

It was dark, but there was truth in it, and an echo. Out of the dead horse came the laughter, out of the strong came the sweetness.

Now my father’s gone, and the lion on the tin has been resurrected for marketing purposes, and I'm thinking about James and his meaningless puzzle, and Nick Kershaw’s nonsense lyrics, and how all of us are still doing the same thing: trying to find answers in the unanswerable.

Some riddles were never meant to be solved. Maybe they exist to remind us that the answer - if there is one - always changes shape when you think you’ve got it.