Ten days ago, I stopped for breakfast at a McDonald's in West Lothian. It might seem a bit hypocritical, what with my own diet not being exactly superb, but why was I able to witness a fat kid eating an ice cream at 9.22am ?? It was a Friday morning and she was not at school, although I think she had her uniform on - or something that passed for it. So, she was either playing truant, or had got leave of absence for an appointment with the doctor or dentist. Her problems, whether tooth related or obesity based, were not being helped through the ice cream consumption.
Later that afternoon, I stopped at a Little Chef. There were no fat kids in sight. After adding sugar to my take-away coffee, I was instantly appalled at the flimsy nature of the so-called 'stirrer'. When Sir Frank Whittle invented the jet engine, he did not opt for creating a pointless hole in the middle of his invention. When in 1898 John Jaques & Son started manufacturing the first table tennis sets, thus popularising the game, the bats were not given a pointless hole in the middle, as this would have rendered them useless. So, I was dumbfounded to see that the stirrer resembled the thing that is stuck to the underside of the lid in a bottle of bubbles. It was a plastic stick with a stupid oval bit of the bottom. The gap provided space for coffee (or tea, should the drinker prefer it) to pass through, and so avoid movement expected by the one doing the stirring. I tried to mix in the sugar, but despite my efforts, the manoeuvre was unsuccessful - on no less than three counts.
1 The fucking thing was too short, and so holding the top was only possible after accepting that my fingers would enter the liquid as well, and burn.
2 The resilience of the plastic to heat was marginally better than that of candy floss! The thing bent and withered, as it made circuits of the cup under duress.
3 The design fault which left a hole in the bottom bit meant I was flogging a dead horse. At home, I stir my tea with a teaspoon. I have never been tempted to cut a fucking great hole in the big bit at the bottom, in the hope that my tea or coffee might be better stirred!
All of the above serves to illustrate how odd daily life is, as does my recent observation of a purchase at WH Smith, at a railway station. How can it be right that a transaction involving two packets of Walkers Crisps required the use of a debit card? That's right, the customer presented his plastic, entered a PIN, and successfully acquired Smokey Bacon and Cheese & Onion varieties, at 50p per packet. Since when has it been normal to use electronic means at the level of £1 ?? Sad indeed.
The organic cordial I buy has shrunk; the bottle used to be 500ml but on my last trip to Middlesbrough Zoo, it was on the shelf in a 490ml bottle. Incremental rip-off Britain. Quite literally, in this case, the drip drip effect! Meanwhile, Tesco has confirmed via the label on a small bag of 'Value' peppers that the Spanish contents measure 40mm+. I was so glad when eating my fajitas this evening that the peppers had conformed to this wonderfully arbitrary standard - they tasted all the better for it. However, I wonder in these harsh economic conditions whether in May, there might be acceptance of peppers which pass just the 35mm mark . . . I will keep you posted.
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