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.
Graham Bandage's Lovely World 