A new hazard has emerged on my journey from being obese to merely fat.
Auld's the Bakers has instituted a happy hour.
I have already spent too many happy hours in Auld's. For this I blame Alan Sharp, the author and screenwriter who was briefly our lodger while he wrote some of the script for Rob Roy. I think it was the taghairm scene. Taghairm? Look it up. It involves a deid Highland coo and a waterfall.
Sharp made frequent pilgrimages to his home town of Greenock to buy what he called authentic Auld's shell pies. It occurred to me that a pie as we know it is by definition a shell. But I didn't want to challenge a famous writer on tautology and the shell pie. I just helped him eat the pies.
Now I don't have to journey to Greenock. There is an Auld's around the corner. It already exhibits signs of non-Greenockian chic. You can have a skinny latté to sit in with a strawberry cream slice (one of your five a day) and have a read at Take a Break (hubby cheated with secret daughter).
Now there is the happy hour. No cocktails or flutes of prosecco. It's cakes and scones for half-price between 4pm and 5pm. Just what I need. Two Auld's rhubarb (shell) tarts instead of one.
Greggs as well is trying to kill me with kindness. This week's offer is a corn beef pasty, 410 calories worth for only £1. Luckily, and surprisingly for Greggs, the corn beef pasty is no threat to my diet. The filling is squishy and insubstantial and a proper pasty cries out for short-crust not puff. As a consumer graduate of the City Bakeries school of patisserie studies, I should know what I'm talking about.
It's not just Auld's and Greggs tempting the taste buds. The BBC seems to have embarked on a crusade to have everyone eating baked goods. The Great British Bake Off is almost messianic in its efforts to stuff sweetmeats down the nation's cakehole.
Every other cookery programme has folk heaping butter, demerara sugar and double cream into mixing bowls and sending the viewers health to hell at gas mark seven.
There will have to be legislation. Does anyone know a salad joint that is doing happy hour deals on couscous and quinona?
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