Bakeries

I enjoy visiting a bakery as much as the next man, especially if the next man is luxury limo enthusiast, Eric Pickles.

Healthy eating goes out of the window as you enter the kingdom of additives.

I like eating a freshly-baked pasty straight from the paper bag in the street. I don’t care that it was seemingly recently cooked in a volcano, resulting in Simon Weston-esque lips, or that my beard will end up constructed of 5% hair and 95% crumbs. All I need is the infusion of pastry. I’d inject it if I could.

But Greggs? They aren’t known as the “chavvy” bakery for nothing. They’re cheaper, and as a result shitter, than their high-street contemporaries. It’s like a live version of the Jeremy Kyle Show inside and you’ll feel out of place if you aren’t wearing a hoodie, jeans revealing the top two thirds of your underwear or some sort of American sport-themed headwear. Or if you aren’t morbidly obese.

Sadly there are now more Greggs outlets in this country than schools or hospitals (I might have made that up). I can see a future where they have drive-through outlets for the lazy sausage roll addict to get a quick fix.

Worse than the dregs of society you might encounter there are the dregs of society with small children.

“Oh, our baby is crying,” one of them might say, although you’ll need Google Translate to decipher their coded ramblings.

“What might stop it crying? I know, we’ll give it a cheese straw.”

If the child hasn’t inherited its parents’ poor intellect it’ll realise it’s on to a good thing. Cry, get a cheese straw, eat cheese straw, cry again, get another cheese straw, and so on.

If you could sit in a buggy and be pushed around whilst being fed, you’d jump at the chance, wouldn’t you?

This means that the children of the future won’t bother learning to walk and will be wheeled around as they become progressively fatter, before dying of a massive heart attack a week before their eighth birthday.

Pork pie, anyone?