HAVE you been able to track down a jar of Guinness-flavoured Marmite yet?

Ever since I read about this new "limited edition" taste sensation in the Echo on Monday I've been scouting supermarket aisles in the hope of tracking some down.

You see, I've always had a bit of thing about unusual flavours. Perhaps it goes back my first bag of cheese and onion crisps.

In those days, my dad played saxophone in an old-style dance band and would always bring home a bag of Smith's crisps for me.

Of course, crisps were just crisps back then (they came with a little blue bag of salt) and flavours didn't come in to it.

But then one day Dad, who'd been playing at a Freemasons' do, came home with a bag of cheese and onion and my life changed for ever.

Ever since then, it seems, I've had a childish yen for flavours just that little bit out of the ordinary.

For instance, while most of my friends hankered after fruit-flavoured Spangles, I preferred the Olde English variety. There were five or six different types in each tube and my favourite was the privet-green one that nobody else seemed to like.

Untypically for youngsters, I loved its medicinal taste - a strange preference that has followed me through life via root beer (the hint of toothpaste makes it much more interesting than cola) to Laphroaig whisky (which has a peaty suggestion of TCP you'll either love or hate).

One of the benefits of liking unusual flavours, of course, is that you can sometimes make a killing when a new product fails to capture the public imagination and the supermarkets mark down the price.

The Hartley's banana jam, I admit, was a mistake, but I can't get enough of the new line from Fox's (liquorice and aniseed, not mints). And I've just snapped up a couple of bottles of Tate and Lyle's festive syrup (rum and spice flavour), sadly discontinued but knocked down to a ridiculously low price at our local supermarket.

Oddly, my taste for unusual flavours has never really extended to experimentation with meat, and certainly not insects, so I'd fail miserably at a Bush Tucker Trial.

Having said that, however, I must admit to being intrigued by a new line of confectionery spotted in the Food Hall at Fortnum and Mason's on a recent trip to London.

The transparent amber slab of sugar candy, about the size of a bar of soap, wasn't in the least out of the ordinary but the scorpion "preserved" in the middle certainly added an element of novelty.

I'm not sure whether I'd like scorpion flavour or not. But at least I could use the sting to pick my teeth once I'd crunched my way through the sugar candy.