A Kettle Made Entirely Of Caramac

Regular readers of my Twitter, of whom there are very nearly one hundred, i.e. 99, will already have seen the above picture, which I posted yesterday. But my confusion continues to grow. I hope that by articulating my confusion I will be able to put the matter to rest and can resume thinking about gnats, ginger beer and unlikely soup.

I’ll state it, in bald terms, and then let’s see where we go. It’s a temping agency which has been forced to close its doors because of a staff shortage.

I’ll write that again: a temping agency which has been forced to close its doors because of a staff shortage.

No, it’s still not working. Maybe if I show the picture again?

No, it’s no better. A company whose very purpose is to find people to fill temporary vacancies is forced to close because it has a temporary vacancy. Can you imagine the sense of failure there when this cropped up? A dirty great cloud of ennui. It’d be like the whole of the remaining staff were forced to wear parkas in the warm weather, but parkas made of gloom.

“Seriously, Brian,” one of them would no doubt ask, “What are we here for? Really, what are we here for? We’re like firefighters standing outside the fire station as it burns to the ground. Smug bastard fetishists unsatisfied in Piers Morgan’s house. Chavs, Brian, chavs, with the price of a sausage roll in their pocket, starving to death in the middle of Greggs. We are, in short, utter failures.”

“We are, to be fair,” Brian the manager would say. “Ah, well, I’d better go and print off a sign to stick on the door. I shall use Comic Sans to underline our hopelessness.”

I’m still confused. In a way I’m just as much a failure as them, but in all the other ways I’m not.

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Excess baggage

Well, that was a concern.

I’ve just been to Gregg’s for two sausage rolls. I was served by a polite young man, brisk but efficient. And, before I go on, can I just say how nice it was to see a man break through the glass ceiling at Gregg’s and be promoted to the front counter. I’ve seen men at the back before in those white trilby things carrying trays, but it’s rare to see one in the shop proper.

Anyway, he put the sausage rolls in the paper bag, as I was expecting. But then, and this is the killer, he put the paper bag in ANOTHER plastic bag.

Why did he feel it necessary to double the baggage? It’s not like it was pornography (although they do have a similar arousing effect on my corpulent colleague Fat Brian). I wasn’t ashamed of my purchase at the time, although in retrospect I do feel a bit queasy after eating two. I’ll stick to one in future, or a steak slice/Cornish pasty if I’m feeling peckish.

Perhaps it wasn’t for my benefit. Perhaps the health police want sausage rolls hidden away. If that’s the case, how dare they? How bloody dare they?

But maybe that wasn’t the reason. Now, the sausage rolls weren’t very hot. In fact, they were lukewarm. Perhaps the Gregg’s operative was hoping the rolls would retain their heat better in a double-bagging arrangement. But he was wrong. Dead wrong. For a start there was one of those little perfectly round holes which still had the punched-out bit of plastic attached at the bottom of the bag – a bit like Nearly-Headless Nick from the Harry Potter books. I’m never sure what those holes are for, by the way, a safety precaution for any primordial dwarfs who fall into them, perhaps, to stop them from suffocating? In any case, the holes stopped the bag acting as an impromptu vacuum flask.

The third reason, and by far the least likely, is that the Gregg’s chap forgot that he was only dealing with one bag and placed the sausage rolls in a second bag in a reflex action. That would be like the time I bought a meat pie (no chips) from The Lobster Pot chip shop in Liverpool city centre and the nice lady behind the counter, unbidden, covered it in salt and vinegar (I’m not going to go on about this, I’ve visited this before on the Internet). But the likelihood that this would happen to me twice – and both involving pastry products – is so remote as to be almost impossible.

So I am left with three possible explanations, none of which are entirely satisfactory. You can see why I’m so perturbed.

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