It started with the Nandos ‘do we look like your servants? Get off your arse and order your own food’ ethos, which, while now accepted by many, still confounds citizens of smaller UK settlements lucky enough to be blessed by the Nando’s national rollout (‘I hear they’re opening one of these “Nandosses” on the High Street, Pam. Eileen took her kids to one when she went up to Taunton last month – said they butchered the chickens IN FRONT OF HER VERY EYES! I know!’).

Gradually, we’ve reached a stage where cafes and restaurants are asking us baffling questions like ”Shall I upgrade you to Phoenix Style mayo?” or “Would you like that in a brocco or a tapalé? A brocco is just 30p more” or “How would you like your cabbage – murdered or raped?”.

Is everything okay with your babalino, sir? Would you like more melgrano?

You feel so embarrassed as a first-timer having to say you don’t understand what your ‘barista’ or ‘passador’ is asking, and they must feel like complete jeb ends having to ask fellow English speakers such ridiculous questions hundreds of times a day. It’s especially embarrassing when you’re in the company of someone who makes a weekly pilgrimage to get their hit of  murdered cabbage and can’t understand why you find such a simple task of selecting how you want your food so difficult.

Subway, ostensibly just a shop selling sandwiches, is somewhere on this spectrum of food outlets that require you to pass a GNVQ (or level-3 diploma equivalent) to actually get lunch. When you’re a regular Subway goer, it feels normal. You forget what it was like to be a Subway virgin. Until, in a state of hunger, you find yourself stood behind a Subway novice…

Stuck in the queue behind a Subway first-timer

I’m nearly at the front of the queue. I’m so close to getting my lunch on. This geezer in front looks like he could be a first-timer though.

Customer: Hi mate, can I have a ham sandwich please?

Oh here we go!

Sandwich Artist: What bread?

Customer: Pardon?

Sandwich Artist: What bread would you like?

Customer: Err…in a roll please.

Sandwich Artist: [Pointing out the tray of perpetually fresh breads] Choose which type of ‘roll’, sir.

Customer: [looks at selection] What’s ‘Italian’?

Sandwich Artist: Just white.

Customer: Hmm…and what’s ‘Hearty Italian’?

Sandwich Artist: White with…erm…heartiness.

Customer: Okay. I’ll just have brown actually.

Sandwich Artist: Wheat?

Customer: Well, yeah. It’s bread.

Sandwich Artist: No, ‘Wheat’ is brown, ‘Italian’ is white. You want ‘Wheat’, yes?

Customer: Sure.

Sandwich Artist: Footlong or six-inch?

Customer: What do you mean?

Sandwich Artist: Do you want full size bread or half size?

Customer:…

Sandwich Artist: [demonstrates with hands on loaf]

Customer: Oh right. Half size will be fine.

Sandwich Artist: With ham?

Customer: Yes please. Can I have some tomato as well?

Sandwich Artist: Yes, I’ll get to that bit in a second.

Customer: Okay. Can I have the turkey as well actually?

Sandwich Artist: Yeah, that’s fine. It’s the same price as ham.

RIP the £1.99 Sub of the Day deal

Customer: Oh is it? Well can I have beef instead of turkey?

Sandwich Artist: Double meat costs 50p more.

Customer: Oh right. Well, I won’t have the beef then.

Sandwich Artist: Do you want ham and turkey instead?

Customer: You said it was 50p more.

Sandwich Artist: No, that’s ham and beef. Ham and turkey is the same price.

Customer: Oh I see. I’ll stick to just the ham if it’s all the same.

Sandwich Artist: Cheese and toasted?

Customer: Does it cost more?

Sandwich Artist: No

Customer: Yes please.

Sandwich Artist: [places ingredients on sandwich and places in the toaster. Removes following 'ping'] Which salad for you?

Customer: Can I have any of it?

Sandwich Artist: Yes sir.

Customer: Okay. Can I have tomatoes?

Sandwich Artist: [places tomatoes on sandwich]

Customer:…and salad [pointing at lettuce]

Sandwich Artist: [places lettuce on sandwich]

Customer: Sorry, am I allowed to have more salad?

Sandwich Artist: Yes, you take your pick from the salad.

Customer: No, I mean can I have more salad please?

Sandwich Artist: [places more lettuce on sandwich]

Customer: Thanks. And can I have…cucumber…sweetcorn…peppers…

Sandwich Artist: [places cucumber, sweetcorn and peppers on sandwich]

Customers: Is that chillies?

Sandwich Artist: Jalapeños, yes.

Customer: Okay. None of those actually. Have you got any red peppers?

Sandwich Artist: No.

Customer: Right. That should be fine mate.

Sandwich Artist: Any sauce?

A completely unrelated Subway.

Customer: What have you got.

Sandwich Artist: Mayo? Barbecue? Honey Mustard? Sweet Onion?…

Customer: Have you got any sweet chilli?

Sandwich Artist: No sweet chilli, no.

Customer: Okay. Have you got any brown sauce?

Sandwich Artist: Yes.

Customer: Hmm, interesting…. Can I have…mmm…ketchup?

Sandwich Artist: Ketchup?

Customer: Yes please.

Sandwich Artist: [puts ketchup on sandwich and wraps up] Any cookie, crisps or drinks for you?

Customer: Can I have a coke please?

It's a footlong - but I wouldn't use it as a rule.

Sandwich Artist: [hands Customer a cup] Here you go.

Customer: Where’s the drink?

Sandwich Artist : Drinks machine is over there. You help yourself.

Customer: Oh right. Can I have a straw?

Sandwich Artist: Straws are over there too.

Customer: Okay. Do you have a lid for this cup mate?

Sandwich Artist: Lids are next to the straws.

Customer: Great.

Sandwich Artist: That’s £3.99 altogether.

Customer: Crikey! I can get a Sainsbury’s Meal Deal for that. Can I just leave it please, mate? Ta-ra now.

Review: Simple dining has never been so complicated.
6/10

Let me stop you there…”If you choose to move on [from breastmilk]…?”
‘If’?
‘IF‘?!
What the hell, Aptamil! You DISGUST me.

Review: Only a disturbed mother could love it.
2/10

Review: Great idea. Disappointingly bland taste.
1/10

The abuse of the English language is something that can really drive people insane. Sloppy language use has always been around, but the evidence has truly unravelled in these times of rapid communication. While an errant apostrophe can seriously knock a confident writer of his or her feet, we mustn’t forget that we’re all human. All that said, do you want to know something that will genuinely blow your socks off? Something that has surely gone over your head? In fact, I reckon it has definitely gone over your head.
I have literally been playing with your brain in the last paragraph…

I literally couldn't give a shit.

You see, while my ‘misuse’ of ‘literally’ may have set off klaxons in the language processing area of your head, the exact same type of ‘misuse’ of other words probably crept past your alarm system unnoticed.

You might say that I can’t have literally been playing with your brain unless I performed some kind of invasive surgery (which is not my bag, let me tell you). But the first paragraph is riddled with the same kind of logic.
Has language abuse ever really driven someone insane? Has it truly unravelled in recent times? Can an apostrophe seriously knock a writer off their feet? Are you socks genuinely still on? Surely they are. They definitely are.

"I am GENUINELY speechless. But not *literally* speechless. That would be silly."

The thing about the word ‘literally’ is that it has been cruelly victimised as the trickster who sets successful people ‘on fire’,  makes talent show contestants ‘nail’ songs to imaginary surfaces and causes people who laugh too much to ‘die’. ‘Literally’ is sent to think about what it has done on the English language’s naughty step alongside txt-speak and filler words like ‘like’, like.
Meanwhile words like ‘seriously’, ‘really’ and even the seemingly angelic ‘definitely’ continue to enact chaos almost wherever they go despite having virtually the same natural meaning.

It’s not just my rambling opinion I’ve based this on. A linguist, Michael Israel, has written an entire academic paper (PDF) on the subject showing that ‘literally’ is in the process of the same change that similar words went through before it.

While the likes of ‘genuinely’ have escaped all the tellings-off, little old ‘literally’ is the only word that got caught. It is not allowed to be used for emphasis like its friends are free to do. It is only allowed to be used to tell the truth and nothing but the truth.

Poor ‘literally’.
You’ve been stitched up good and proper by those other words.

Wouldn't want to meet this down a dark alley, would you?

Talk proper.

Hard as some people may find it, words not only can, but regularly do have more than one meaning. I don’t even know anymore if ‘wicked’ still means ‘bad’, or if ‘bad’ still means ‘good’, or if ‘good’ means…come to think of it, that’s a pretty reliable one, but you get my point.

People who believe that there is some time in which the English language was at its best and that we should try to keep language like it was then are being irrational. I thought like those people once too, but now I’ve seen the error of my ways. If we don’t allow change, then we just end up getting more and more irate at the instances where the language wants to go where it feels and we’re not letting it.
It seems ridiculous when you stop and think that English language users get so uppity about how to correctly use ‘literally’ but can’t quite be bothered to come to a decision on how to spell yoghurt/yogurt/yoghourt.

I think it’s time that we perhaps started to think about letting ‘literally’ go and be free with its emphasis-marking brethren. After all, aren’t there bigger fish to fry? Especially while there are people who use the word ‘barter’ where they mean ‘haggle’…

Review: I could literally murder anyone who picks on that poor word.
8/10

Oh crikey! It’s Eurovision time again.
It seems like only yesterday that Josh Dubovie was shimmying around to an unused Steps B-side while dressed as Carphone Warehouse Essex & Hertfordshire Regional Salesman of the Year. Last year’s UK entry came away in last place with 10 points, so the UK have decided to try to reverse their fortune this year (which is becoming something of a Eurovision mantra) by sending in the big guns with the newly reformed Blue, who are back from their 6-year long ‘year out’ from music.

Where the hell have Blue been?

Simon Webbe
Made some Lighthouse Family-esque songs presumably to cash in on the sofa advert music market. Kept the bailiffs away by eating a bollock or something on ‘I’m A Celebrity…‘.

Lee Ryan
Assaulted a cab driver in Surrey – £300 fine. Had a child named Rayn Ryan – No fine.

Duncan James
Sang that song from The Woman in Black (or possibly The Woman in White. One of those), ‘danced’ on ice, played a fictionalised version of himself in a Channel 4 sitcom, pushed the button that isn’t connected to anything on the National Lottery more times than one can count and presented a quiz show set on rollercoasters for reasons known only to the production company.

Anthony Costa
2005 – probably fished a polystyrene star out of rats’ intestines on ‘I’m a Celebrity…‘. 2006 – came second to Daz Sampson in Eurovision: Making Your Mind Up. 2009 – played Jack in Jack & The Beanstalk at the Ipswich Regent. 2011 – urinated at the cash dispenser of Trafalgar Square Post Office.

Because there are only so many of them who can do 'I'm A Celebrity...' before it becomes a somewhat tragic joke.

Now that they are back, fans of Blue may be pleased to hear that the guys have stuck to their familiar format. Simon Webbe does some low bits, Lee Ryan does some high bits, Duncan James does some whispery bits and Anthony Costa shuffles around earning just as much money as the rest of them.

In all seriousness, this might be the UK’s best shot at a Eurovision win in years as this year’s ‘okay but pretty forgettable track’ is sung by a Europe-wide renowned group who can probably handle performing to a big audience in Germany. So best of luck to Blue. Let’s hope they can bring the UK a win that will no doubt do wonders for the economy, or whatever gain we’re meant to get by winning an international songwriting competition. Nobody’s quite sure. In fact, I think it might be a book token…

Review: Blue cheese is as good as any cheese.
6/10

It’s funny. This advertisement has been on for a few weeks now and I think it makes me even MORE apoplectic with rage every time I see it.

This is weird, because usually when I see a terrible advert I eventually come around to how terrible it is and simply put it in the back of my mind.
The whole Halifax Radio campaign is almost like an occasional invitation by the TV to give my brain to a 30 second break from activity. It’s my body’s protection mechanism, you see. Should my mind ever become responsive enough to sense that the advert is on, I could in an instant reflex become so filled with bilious hate that there’s a very real and dangerous possibility that I might violently yell a vital organ out in the direction of the screen.

The strangest thing in this extended version is when Fake Rhod Gilbert says the terrible ‘joke’:

When the government abolished hanging in 1969, they didn’t mean clothes, ladies.

the laughter from the audience is barely more than a titter. It’s as if the maker of the ad thought ‘Well, that’s quite obviously not a very funny joke so we’ll get the sound guy to give it less laughs than the ‘A material’ gags’.

The most annoying part is that we completely lose track of what the advert is even for. You don’t know it’s an ad for IKEA until the very end. Even if you did know, the whole stand-up element is so bloody distracting that with all the urge-to-kill rising in you, you’d hardly stop to notice any of the close-ups of various modular furnishings.

It’s really hard to know how we’ve come to this.
We have in front of us a petty squabble in which no conclusion or even the vaguest hint at compromise is reached.
I mean, I can’t speak for all 3 billion men out there but I’d hazard a guess that men are messier than women, but probably only by a tiny margin.

But regardless of whether that judgement is true or not, it’s such a crap and simplistic approach to our existence on this earth to separate the human species into tidy (and untidy) binary compartments.

The messiest man is probably not a lot more or less untidy than the messiest woman. The tidiest man is probably not a lot more or less unmessy than the tidiest woman.

I suspect that if you put us all on a global scale of messiness, a house-proud man living in a very well-kept Sao Paolo favela would be some way behind a flighty and frivolous woman living in a Stockholm loft apartment ‘between housekeepers’.
The accident of birth that is our sex is as much a solution for how tidy we are as the accident of birth that is where on the planet we happened to be spat out.

So you see, far from the message of ‘Peace, Love & Storage’, this ad actually makes you think of the ways in which society puts us all into divisions whether we want to be there or not. IKEA have had so many great, genuinely funny adverts in the past that I don’t see how this cringefest slipped through the net.

Review: Ideally, all copies of this ad should be kept locked in an EFFEKTIV never to be seen again.
1/10

“Hey, Ma. I got a new drum machine from Dad for Christmas. I might use it on this Bonnie Tyler track I’m working on.”
The rest, as they say, is history.

Review: Powerful, but more memorable as the soundtrack to the world’s least perilous game of Chicken in the 1984 dance film, Footloose.
7/10

• “Is it true that McDonalds food has like worms and stuff in it and that the mc nuggets are made from like grows leftovers from chicken? I just really want to know what you put in your food.”
• “is it true that 7 different specimens of semen were found in a banana milkshake?”
• “Do you still support the IRA by giving them a percentage of your profit?”
• “today in school i learned that there were four types of recycled plastic in McDonalds milkshake. Why dont you explain further more about that? i think that is totally disgusting and u guys should be sued.”

Milkshake content aside, the one thing about McDonald’s that I always put down to mythology was the existence of the Filet O Fish. We all know it’s a menu option but have any of us seen it in the wild? Surely this fish and cheese combo (something that is most possibly non-kosher and most definitely a traumatic reminder of Magaluf ’09 for Darren from Doncaster) can’t possibly exist.

I firmly believed that nobody in the world had ever eaten a Filet O Fish, but that it was simply created one time to pose for the photo that goes on the menu boards and never recreated again. Either that or they put some kind of psychoactive drug in the bun to make sure that nobody ever talks about their experience with the burger. This, as you are about to learn (if you didn’t already figure out), is not true.

I defiantly strutted up to the counter at the McDonald’s on George Street, Croydon and asked the jaded cashier for a medium Filet O Fish meal with Coke:

“Can I have a medium Filet O Fish (fill-i’) meal with Coke, please?”
“A Filet (fill-ay)?”
“Yeah, Filet (fill-it).”

I had already tripped up on pronunciation. Who could have known in South London that I should have Frenched-up my accent? I was rumbled. She knew that I wasn’t a Filet regular. What if she sussed that I would do a review of it? She could have easily put some of these hallucinogens in my burger to make sure I never remembered eating it. I think I was lucky, but remember that if you’re going to try this yourselves, readers.

I took the meal to a table and got some photo evidence before consuming anything just to make sure that I would have some kind of proof that this happened. The box invited me to…

‘Dive in’. I see what they did there. The box also wanted me to…

‘Delicate flavour’, eh? I opened up the container to finally lay eyes on this fabled sandwich and was greeted by this…

Was THAT the Filet O Fish I’ve wondered so much about for years? It was tiny. No bigger than the cheeseburger you can get with a Happy Meal.
Unlike the picture on the box, the cuboid of breaded fish wasn’t bursting out of the bun, but was actually almost entirely concealed by soft roll of bread. The cheese wasn’t flopped over the fish either, but rather tucked away underneath like a roll of yellow plastic with a conjoined fish finger rested on top.
I thought ‘Come on, Nick. It’s not gonna eat itself (not in the immediate 4 or 5 days anyway)’ and started to tuck in…

It was really weird. Because I was aware of the fact I was chewing, but not really of anything being chewed. It wasn’t really salty. It wasn’t sweet. It wasn’t juicy or chewy or meaty.
It wasn’t really…anything.
There was nothing at all about the Filet O Fish that was in any way remarkable in flavour.

I had to actually check the (liberally applied) tartare sauce to see if they hadn’t accidentally put mayonnaise in instead as I couldn’t even really taste that.

Suddenly it all made sense. The reason why I had gone so many years without encountering any Filet O Fish fans or someone who occasionally tries one or even anyone who has eaten one at all. It’s not because the Filet is a myth; a product that exists solely in urban legend. Quite the opposite really. Nobody talks about the Filet O Fish, because there’s nothing to talk about.

Compared with the other Extra Value Meal options, where the McChicken Sandwich clings to your teeth and the Quarter Pounder with Cheese excites your saliva glands and the Big Mac cavorts with your crucial arteries, the Filet O Fish probably passes through your entire alimentary canal without doing anything interesting or stimulating at all. It’s all just a load of pollocks!

Review: Doesn’t live up to the expectations that none of us have.
2/10

Top 5 faces of Twiggy 2011

5 – Mumsy TwiggyNB. Brand new -10° angle head-tilt

4 – Indigestion Twiggy

3 – Completely IN time Twiggy!

2 – Magic mushroom trip at a party Twiggy

1 – “I’m watching you” Twiggy

Hmm, plus ça change…

Review: Would make a good title sequence for a TV show about a group of women who are friends despite having very little in common (Disparate Housewives?)
8/10

Beans, beans,
the musical fruit,
the more you eat,
the more you pollute
(so do, please, look into what your local council provides with regards to aluminium recycling)

Branston Baked Beans are brilliant. I’m a fan of baked beans in general -  they’re perfect for covering the main food groups while being delicious and hearty to boot.

NO!

My favourite way to enjoy Branston beans is on a jacket potato with cheese. While we’re on the topic, what’s the deal with cafés, canteens, etc. that charge EXTRA for having cheese with your beans on a jacket potato? It’s a fundamental right that beans should be served with cheese, not an added bonus. Fair enough if I was asking for chilli-con-carne and tuna together like some kind of chuffing mentalist without tastebuds but you can’t go about asking for 50p extra for cheese on beans. AND the cheese should go on top of the beans not on top of the potato, in order to allow maximum sauce permeation into the potato flesh and moderate cheese meltage. But I digress.

Branston beans have a particularly good sauce to bean ratio. Saucy, but not too saucy (like some supermarket brand beans). Beany, but not too beany (like the classic Heinz Beans Beanz). All in all, the best baked beans.

Review: I guarantee you’ll like them more than your favourite brand of baked beans, or I’ll give you your money back*. (*I won’t do this.)
8/10