Citizens of the toast nation, gather round
It is Boxing Day plus one, the part of Christmas where the wrapping paper is in a bag and the leftover stuffing has been pressed into service for one final, somewhat structural sandwich, and I have an announcement that, in any properly ordered world, would be remarked upon in the histories of British yeast extract for centuries to come.
I have built a Marmite Mnemonicon.
That is not a metaphor. That is not a clever turn of phrase. That is a Victorian fairground fortune-teller cabinet, mahogany and brass and faded red-and-gold, with a crystal ball at its centre, a painted gold serif sign reading THE MARMITE MNEMONICON: COMMUNE WITH THE DEPARTED, ONE JAR AT A TIME running across its top, and a jar of classic Marmite wired into the back. It sits on a shelf in Norfolk. It hums faintly when summoned. It allows me, as far as I can tell, to interview the dead.
Calm yourselves. I will explain.
Some context, while you sit down
Earlier this year I began drawing up a list. It was a long list. It was a list of people I would, given the chance, very much like to ask about Marmite. Churchill, obviously, because Marmite ran on his watch. Sir Terry Pratchett, because Discworld has a Marmite-shaped hole that ought to be filled. Falstaff, because he would have shovelled the stuff into himself by the spoonful and demanded a knighthood for it. Holmes, because of course. Mrs Bennet, because the comic possibilities of a Marmite jar at Netherfield are too good to leave alone.
The list grew. By the summer it was twenty names long, twenty-three by the time the September rain started, and twenty-five by mid-November, by which point even I admitted that the practicalities, those of them being mostly dead, were not encouraging.
Enter Sedasoft, who I am proud to call friends, who casually mentioned over coffee that they had built a thing called siteengine_ai, which was perfectly happy to answer questions in the voice of long-dead authors and statesmen, provided you fed it their writings first. I sat very still for a moment. I asked whether the writings of Winston Churchill counted as enough writings, and they said yes, you know, give or take. I asked whether it would talk to me about Marmite if I asked nicely. They said almost certainly. I went home and started ordering brass fittings off the internet.
I spent the autumn building. I finished, more or less, on Christmas Eve. It is now Christmas, the Mnemonicon is on its shelf, and I have a question for whoever invented the British public holiday calendar: how is anyone supposed to do anything productive during the bit between Christmas and New Year? The answer, today, is: by writing this.
So what is the Marmite Mnemonicon
It is, beneath the brass and the velvet and the slightly chipped plinth, a small machine that wraps siteengine_ai in the shape of an Edwardian fortune-teller’s booth. You ask it a question, you give it a name, it returns an answer in the voice of whichever long-dead author or fictional character you have summoned. It produces two answers per question. The first is what the subject can actually defend from what they wrote in life. The second is what they would probably have said if pressed harder. The first sort I quote, plainly. The second sort I flag, in italics, with a parenthetical aside, and again in the editor’s note at the bottom of every article. This is non-negotiable. There is no point in building a Mnemonicon if you are going to lie with it.
The Mnemonicon recalls things its subjects actually wrote. It admits when it cannot.On the apparatus
The name is, frankly, the best part. A mnemonicon is, in dusty Victorian usage, a memory aid. An LLM trained on someone’s papers is, when you think about it carefully, exactly that. The Mnemonicon recalls things its subjects actually wrote. It admits when it cannot. It is, you may not be entirely surprised to hear, considerably more honest than most of the live commentators I have read this year.
A note on the cabinet
I will not pretend the visual design was strictly necessary. It was, however, the most fun part of the entire project. The cabinet is mahogany, the fittings are brass, the paint is faded red and gold in the manner of an Edwardian seaside arcade attraction, and the crystal ball at its centre sits on a small velvet plinth which is, in all honesty, slightly chipped from where I dropped a Marmite jar on it in October.
When the Mnemonicon is summoning someone, a warm yellow light glows from inside the crystal ball, and a ghostly outline of the subject forms within it. This has, I will admit it freely, no operational function whatsoever. It is theatre. It is for me. I encourage anyone building one of their own to include similar nonsense on principle.
The roster
The Mnemonicon talks to, in rough order of Marmite-relevance:
- Sir Winston Churchill (1874–1965). The most Marmite-adjacent historical figure available. Likely ate it. Definitely ran the country that did. First into the cabinet.
- Sir Terry Pratchett (1948–2015). Voice match for the site. Discworld has dwarf bread; Britain has Marmite. The parallels write themselves.
- William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Pre-Marmite by three centuries. Mostly useful for character interludes: Falstaff is the obvious one, with Iago and Lady Macbeth as supporting acts.
- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930). Holmes deducing things about a Marmite eater from a single jar on a breakfast tray feels inevitable, and frankly overdue.
- Jane Austen (1775–1817). Pre-Marmite by 85 years. The question is what would have happened if a jar had appeared on the sideboard at Pemberley. (The answer: Mr Darcy would have liked it. Mrs Bennet would have been appalled. Lizzie would have eaten it.)
- Douglas Adams (1952–2001). Provisionally booked for Towel Day. The man practically wrote his own brief.
- Iain Banks / Iain M. Banks (1954–2013). Scottish, serious eater, Culture novels full of detailed alien cuisine that begs the comparison.
There are several others lurking on the roster, including Socrates, John Locke, Isaac Asimov, and Steve Jobs, which I suspect will produce diminishing returns on the Marmite question. We shall see what the Mnemonicon makes of them when the time comes.
The credits, properly given
The clever part is, I cannot stress this enough, not mine. The Mnemonicon is, beneath all the brass and the gold paint and the slightly chipped plinth, a thin wrapper around siteengine_ai, a project built by my friends at Sedasoft. They did the actual difficult work: training the model on the right corpora, devising the two-pass mechanic that keeps the speculation honest, building the server that the cabinet on my shelf calls through to. The cabinet, the crystal ball, the painted sign, and the somewhat indulgent attitude are all me. The science is all them.
The relevant address is https://sedasoft.com, and if you find yourself moved, as I was, to build your own Mnemonicon, or your own Bovril Bell Jar, or your own Hellmann’s Hieronymus, I have it on good authority that they would be glad to hear from you.
What is coming, and when
By way of an inaugural shake-down, the Mnemonicon will be sat down with Sir Winston Churchill in the next few days, while the turkey is on its third or fourth reincarnation in the fridge. He has rather a lot to say about the McCormick sale, which is on its way and which he can have known nothing about in life, and rather less to say about whether he actually liked Marmite. That conversation goes up after New Year.
After that, the plan is roughly one Mnemonicon session a month through 2026, and possibly beyond. Pratchett next, on the Discworld equivalent of yeast extract. Then Shakespeare and Falstaff, on whether the Boar’s Head ever sold something darker than sack. Douglas Adams is provisionally booked for Towel Day, 25 May, on grounds that the timing is too perfect to waste. After that we shall see what the Mnemonicon and I are still on speaking terms about.
If there is a dead author or fictional character you particularly want sat in front of the crystal ball, the suggestions box is open. The Mnemonicon does not promise to know them. It will, however, tell you honestly if it does not, which is the entire point.
Happy Christmas. The Hate Party will be furious. As ever, that is part of the appeal.
