The Wheat is Growing Thin...

As seasoned readers will know, it has long been customary for me to take my lunch at my work's refectory.Well, that's what it would have been called in the good old days; before Glasnost and Political Correctness and Blair and Brown and Bush and all those other factors which have conspired to turn the British Isles into a blighted realm as likely to inspire pride as one of those horrid dried-up white dog turds you always used to see littering the pavement...in the good old days...

Anyway, this establishment is now called 'More' - for reasons which will soon become apparent. I go there - went there, I should say...I certainly won't be going back - every working day to partake of their really rather good selection of vegetarian soups. I'd accompany the compote (as poncy people would call the bowl of souped-up gruel they serve) with two thick slices of bread or two rolls, depending upon what was availaible, two small tublets of flora margerine and a fruit smoothie drink. It's the same price everyday - £3.80. I am, if nothing else, a creature of habit.

So, imagine my surprise to see, among the basket of sliced bread and rolls, that the normally unadulterated rolls (they do lovely fruited and nutty ones...) had been bisected - cut down the middle from the top down, not laterally sliced as you normally would to butter them - as if in an attempt to disguise them as ends of a cut loaf.

Of course, the Swipe sensors went into overload - this always happens whenever I fear that I may be asked to pay over the odds (or sometimes to pay at all) for a particular service (or pecadillo). So, by the time I reached the checkout I was braced for the total doled out like a disgusting plate of school spag bol by the boss-eyed, seven chinned troll who earns a crust taking the hard-borrowed grants out of the pocket of the impoverished student body and straining her vocabulary to its very limits in the conducting of such complex exchanges as these. "Four fifty please" she piped, the "pur-leease" sounding as if it were being tugged out of her. She sounded the way people who know and are unable or unwilling to disguise the fact that they're taking the piss do; her voice quavering with false politeness, the words barely able to conceal a guilty, glottal gulp. I handed over a fiver and told her that I could have bought the same amount of bread as two rolls yesterday for half the price. "I dun set prices", she grizzled, pawing a fifty pence piece into my palm, as if taking immeasurable pride from her own terminal ignorance - the gesture and her unchallengable air of smugness at her own stupidity concluding the transaction once and for all.

I headed off to get my cutlery, still shaking my head at this despicable capitalist wheeze, when I spotted one of the suited floorwalkers who flit hither and thither about the canteen to no apparent purpose (except, from what I can ascertain, to hold impromptu cabals with six or seven of their fellow somnabulants which seem designed purely to block consumers from the wares they wish to purchase). I put the same point to this - I'm presuming - managerial-level employee, reiterating the fact that, overnight, the cost of a roll had doubled. "He looked at me blankly before extending his jaw a little in the bemused manner of Valentine Dyall, Dreyfuss's assistant in the Pink Panther movies, and informing me (a little impatiently, I felt) of the following fluctuation in the international food market:

"Well, there have been quite significant increases in the price of wheat, didn't you know...."

So there you have it, dear, blessed Swipesters. Load up your gas-guzzlers with Mother's Pride - get the freezer stacked with Hovis. I can't begin to imagine what effect a *two-hunderd* *per* *cent* increase in the price of bread will have on the global economy, but at least now I know why the place is called fucking 'More'...


L.U.V. on y'all,

Bob




xxx
Bob

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