Spoiler: it’s not flowers.
Once Upon a Time
Every great story starts somewhere and this one starts in a primary school playground, with two little girls – one redhaired, one brunette - and a panda in a crocheted jacket.
The red-haired girl remembers the brunette’s very first day at school, arriving on the front of her mother’s push bike, clutching said panda. They became firm friends, the kind who go on to spend their teenage years listening to records together and thinking they are absolutely, unquestionably, the coolest people alive.
They were into Dire Straits. Oh so alternative and edgy. The brunette (Helen) used to belt out the Money for Nothing lyrics with tremendous confidence; the only problem was they were wrong.
What Mark Knopfler sang: “...and TVs”
What Helen sang: “...anchovies.”
Every time, with gusto.
Years passed and as is so often the case, the girls drifted apart. Helen went off and did flower things, whilst the red-haired one went off and did her own thing. And then one day, a parcel arrived from the red-haired one.
Inside: a tin of anchovies.
Big Fish, Little Fish, No Cardboard Box
Many years later, Helen found herself scuba diving inside a massive, shimmering, silver ball of anchovies.
Imagine that for a moment, you’re suspended in the ocean, whilst around you, in every direction, thousands of tiny fish move as one — a living, flashing, impossibly beautiful sphere of scales and light.
But it’s not just brunettes who are attracted to schools of anchovies. Bigger fish with recognisable theme tunes are fond of them too.
And there they were: Helen, the anchovies, and some hungry sharks. The experience, Helen will tell you, was “absolutely amazing.” No cardboard box for Helen to go home in thankfully, though quite a few anchovies didn’t make it into a tin.
Keto and the Lincolnshire Show
Somewhere between the panda and the sharks, Helen and her red-haired friend from school had stayed connected — Helen had prepared her wedding flowers — but the closeness of those teenage years had faded. Hardly surprising as Helen had spent a significant portion of the intervening decades flitting off to look at fish or obsess over flowers.
Roll on 2025, and Helen decided she needed a mini health overhaul – enter keto.
The keto adventure was properly underway around the time of the Lincolnshire Show, where Evolve Flowers dressed a double-decker bus in approximately seven and a half thousand sunflowers. It was spectacular to look at. It was also absolutely roasting hot, and due to a very tight timeline (they were given five days), it was fairly stressful, too. Helen was desperately trying not to eat chocolate.
Into this overheated, sugar-deprived moment stepped a keto specialist, with a piece of advice that would change everything:
“What you really need,” she said, “is anchovies.”
Helen mentioned that there was something of a story about anchovies. Chapter one – songs; chapter two - sharks. The specialist was unruffled; “Well,” she said, “this is chapter three.”
Helen tried the anchovies. They tasted, she reports, really, really good. A few of them, it turns out, can sustain you for hours. She was converted.
Where have all the anchovies gone?
And here is where the story takes a turn towards the baffling.
Why can you not buy fresh anchovies when you want them?
For a while, Morrisons came through. Every other week, Helen would appear at the fish counter like a woman on a mission. Fresh anchovies in a little pot: £1.39. Perfect, sustainable, delicious. And then, one day, they simply vanished. No explanation, just the cruel, tin-flavoured alternative on the shelf.
It seems Helen is in the wrong demographic. Waitrose: no. M&S: no. Lidl: no. The tinned ones, everywhere, but they are categorically not the same.
Helen returned home and announced this injustice to her husband. You can sustain yourself for a really long time on a few anchovies, she told him. Why is this so hard? The husband listened, and he took note. And the husband, on a subsequent occasion, came home with the quiet pride of a man who has done something right.
“I went specially off the beaten track,” he announced. “Went to that supermarket and I bought you some anchovies.”
This, friends, is what romance looks like when you’re a florist on keto. Certainly not roses. Anchovies.
The Christmas anchovy incident
Word had spread. Helen’s parents had heard the anchovy saga — the keto, the supermarket shortage, the husband’s heroic detour. And so, at Christmas, her mother did what mothers do when they have been paying attention.
She gift-wrapped anchovies.
Seven tins. Possibly more. Wrapped, under the tree for Helen.
The problem — the only problem — was that they were in tins. They were the wrong kind. The kind that Helen has tried repeatedly and concluded are, to use her technical term, “bloody awful.”
She went off her rocker, in the way that only someone who has spent the year keeping an entire flower business, a sunflower-covered double-decker bus, a keto lifestyle, and a household together can go off their rocker: with a certain magnificent intensity.
“But I thought you liked them”, her mother pleaded.
The tins are still in the cupboard. Seven of them, maybe more, lined up as a monument to good intentions and the critical importance of specifying “fresh.” There is also a stash of sardines in tomato sauce (45p from Lidl, since you ask), various experimental anchovy fillets, and a general sense that the cupboard is now, a tinned small-fish archive.
Helen does not like any of them. Only the fresh ones.
On anchovies, books, and approaching 60
Here is the thing about the anchovy story: it’s not really about anchovies.
It’s about a friendship that began with a crocheted panda jacket and has threaded its way through decades of life. It’s about a woman who will dive into a bait ball and find it “absolutely amazing.” It’s about the specific, peculiar joy of finding something that works for you — really works, in a ‘I can get through an entire Lincolnshire Show without chocolate’ kind of way — and then not being able to find it in Morrisons, or Waitrose.
It’s also, Helen will tell you, possibly a chapter in a book. Everyone she tells it to says the same thing: write the book. And as she “fast approaches 60,” she’s starting to think they might be right. Not new stuff, just all the stuff already lived — the flowers, the fish, the Dire Straits lyrics she got wrong for years, the sharks, the sunflowers, the seven tins of anchovies — all pulled together.
And apparently, there’s also a camel. But that’s a different chapter entirely.
—
As told, more or less, to Deborah Cater.
Helen Chambers NDSF is the founder of Evolve Flowers Ltd — florist, educator,
storyteller, and reluctant tinned-anchovy owner. Find out more at
evolveflowers.com.