Tag Archives: mcdonalds

The McMost Expensive McMuffin in the McWorld

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Inflation, recession and corporate greed make for a miserable mix. We’ve all been paying through the nose – and every other orifice besides – for everything from petrol, to heating, to butter. But I’ll wager that – unlike yours truly – as bad as things have become, you’ve never paid £105.22 for a Sausage and Egg McMuffin.

I know what you’re thinking. Did the sausage meat come from an endangered rhino? Was the egg that was used in the sandwich laid by a magical hen, which was in turn owned by Lady Gaga? Had the McMuffin been autographed by the late Jeremy Beadle, and using the little withered hand, no less? Well, no.

Let me explain.

My lady and I (yes, I am a Victorian gentleman, thank you very much) had attended her sister’s birthday party on a large campsite somewhere on the outskirts of Galashiels. There’d been a giant fire-pit; a vast, mutant Tiki beach-hut boasting a stage, dance-floor and sufficient seating to trick you into believing that you were in a city-centre boozer (where the booze was free); bathrooms with deodorant in them, for Christ’s sake! It was heaven.

The next morning… not so much.

Sleeping on the ground under a piece of tarpaulin isn’t many people’s idea of a restful night’s kip. Add to that midges and a mild hangover and you’re a good few rings closer to Dante’s Hell than you would be on your average Sunday morning.

I hadn’t had much to drink. My good lady hadn’t either (Editor’s note: may or may not be entirely factual in her case, but there’s a lot more at stake here than veracity). But since neither of us drink more than once in a Blue Nun, we hadn’t needed much alcohol to turn our next morning into a mourning. We greeted the day with a considerable degree of despondency. Until, that is, we remembered the existence of McDonald’s.

Now, McDonald’s beefy and chickeny day-time staples rarely tempt me – though they tempt my children, who usually strong-arm me into going – but their breakfast offerings? McMama Mia! They fall and float down onto my taste-buds like syrup-and-sausage flavoured snowflakes. An almost transcendental experience. If religion wants to compete for our appetites in times of sin and recrimination it’ll have to up its game, with, I don’t know…. Burgers at sermons? Baptising people in Coca Cola? Until then, it’s golden arches, and definitely not golden harps for me.

And thus it came to pass that we were going to McDonald’s, and, yay, verily, we were going to have motherf***ing McMuffins.

There was just one problem.

It was 10:41 and, according to Google Maps, we were sixteen minutes from the nearest McDonald’s – along tractor-infested rural roads to boot. I hastily packed the car – too hastily, as it turned out – and we stuttered and trundled up the all-terrain obstacle course pretending to be a track that snaked its way towards the main road. I say ‘main’ road.

In spite of my worst fears, we were making good time. The roads were smooth and clear. The scenery was wide and breath-taking. The immaculately-grey road sloped and slipped between roller-coastering ski-slopes of greens and browns and yellows, broken up by a circulatory system of dry-stone dykes. Sheaths of sunshine lay like stage-lighting over the gently-swaying fields. It was beautiful. My girlfriend agreed: ‘Pull over,’ she said. ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

Well, what can a man do? Nothing, I suppose, except pull over to the side of the road (I say ‘side’) and sit rubbing his dear lady’s back as she hangs out of the open passenger-side door like a downed pilot hanging from a tree by a parachute, all the while keeping one eye on the digital clock and saying to himself: ‘Shit, it’s 10:50, I’m not going to get my McMuffin now, I’m NOT going to get my McMuffin!’, and feeling like a bastard for it, and then saying out loud, ‘Shhh, shhh, darlin’, it’s okay, you’re going to be fine’, but at the same time thinking, ’10:51!!!! I’ll drive right into that bloody restaurant in my Dacia if they try to offer me a cheeseburger, and I’ll make my own McF***ing McMuffin!’ and feeling a bit queasy himself now because he’s clearly the sort of person who places the acquisition of a meaty, eggy takeaway above his beloved’s welfare?

Dear reader: that’s exactly what I did.

A few thwarted spews later and we were back on the road. The clock was ticking. Not literally, you understand, because, as I’ve already established, my car has a digital clock. But you get it, right? I’m trying to sell the impression that this was a race against time, and really tense and that. Which it was. Never-the-less, though, a mere few minutes later we pulled into the McDonald’s parking lot.

And it was 10:56.

Ta-da, right? Phew! You made it, Jamie! Go you, you heroic hunk! Well… no. No, I hadn’t. Of course I hadn’t. Why would I write something about an entirely successful, hitch-free trip to McDonald’s, and why the hell would you read it?

We joined the queue for the drive-through. It was long-ish, and moving incredibly slowly. My choice was either to take my chances in the queue, and hope that my mouth would reach the sound-portal before the electronic menu blinked out its McMuffins and replaced them with Mozzarella Bites. Or I could back out of the queue, park up, and run into the restaurant with minutes to spare instead of seconds. The choice was obvious. I gave a cursory glance through the sleeping bags that were draped like thick theatre curtains at either side of the back windscreen, put the car into reverse and CRUNCH. I know what you’re thinking, but, no: my good lady hadn’t at that moment bit into a particularly crisp Hash Brown. I’d backed into someone’s BMW.

It was 10:57.

I was deeply apologetic, and deeply concerned about the potential financial impact of my actual impact, but that didn’t stop my subconscious from chanting ‘SAUSAGE AND EGG MCMUFFIN!’ at me throughout my entire encounter with my vehicular victim. ‘STOP HIM TALKING! GET THE McMUFFIN! DISTRACT HIM! GIVE HIM YOUR SHOE? OFFER HIM A PARROT! JUST GET BACK IN THE F***ING CAR!’ I don’t think anyone has ever swapped details after an accident as quickly as I did that morning. It was conducted with the speed and finesse of a magic trick.

AND IT WAS 10:59!

The lunch-time face of the electronic menu snapped into place precisely one second after I’d finished ordering our breakfast. We’d made it. And Jamie said, let there be Sausage and Egg McMuffin. And Jamie saw the Sausage and Egg Mc Muffin. And it was good. Amen.

As we parked up to eat, and I bit into that delicious breakfasty mouth-orgasm, I could taste all that I’d gambled and lost. I could taste my regret at having been so hasty, hashy-bashy and myopic. I could taste having to borrow money from my dad to pay for the damage. I could taste the invoice for £102.53 that would arrive on my phone by electronic means two days later. I could taste my own panic and desperation. And do you know what? It tasted great! My sacrifice, the great personal cost, had somehow made that Sausage and Egg McMuffin taste all the sweeter. I’m hooked now. Hooked on excess. I want this to be the only way I experience food from now on. I’m going to blindfold myself and go through a McDonald’s drive-thru in the hopes of sampling the perfect McChicken sandwich. I’m going to order a quail and quinoa sandwich from Vidal Sassoon. I know he’s a hair-dresser, and dead, but that’s how committed I am to this thing.

So, in summary then: I’m skint and I’m stupid.

But do you know what? I’m lovin’ it.

Skinflats and the Magic Torch

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The bonnie village of Skinflats.

Skinflats is actually quite a nice wee village, and I’m not just saying that incase some of its residents read this article. Well, OK, there’s a little of that. Have you seen some of the people who live there? Big leg-o’-lamb arms, match-strike chins and shotgun licences. (hack punchline alert) And that’s just the women! Do you know what Salmand Rushdie’s agent said to him when he was writing ‘The Satanic Verses’?

‘Say what you like about Mohammed, mate, but for fuck’s sake don’t slag off Skinflats.’

‘You aint from around here, are ya, boy?’

The village is surrounded by acres of fields (or, to give them their local name: the burial grounds). Those fields are to the people of Skinflats what the empty desert is to the mobsters of Las Vegas. Many a fingerless hand and a brutally disembodied boaby sleeps with the bushes up them thar fields. So, if it’s all the same with you, I’ll just say nice things. I want to be Robert de Niro in this movie; let some other daft cunt be Joe Pesci.

What I will say is this: I had the pleasure of working in Skinflat’s local shop many, many years ago, and found the village to be a lot like Brookside Close. But with slightly more laughs. And a lot more hidden corpses.

Skinflats, though, eh? What a name. It sounds like the sort of place lost hillwalkers stumble across in the dead of night, tragically unaware that its inhabitants are all horrifically disfigured mutant cannibal serial killers who live in tents made from human flesh. The sort of place whose name you’d never expect to utter without the accompaniment of terrifying, Castle-Dracula-style thunder claps. The sort of place that would make an estate agent say: ‘Well, congratulations on your land purchase. I hope Skinflats proves to be a lucrative location for your new motel, Mr Bates.’

David Beckham was so distressed when Seb Cole told him he had to go to Skinflats, that he started to morph into Bruce Forsyth.

So what was I doing there? Taking a walk down memory lane? Admiring the scenery? Scoring drugs? No, it was Olympic Torch day. The flame had been to Stirling and Falkirk that morning, and was about to be carried through Skinflats on its way to Fife and Edinburgh. The people of Skinflats were overjoyed to be having their ten minutes of fame.

‘This’ll put Skinflats on the map,’ I heard someone say. No. No it won’t. An air strike would put Skinflats on the map. Tomorrow, they won’t even be talking about this in Bo’ness, much less London. Even in fifty years time when some plucky lad who got the day off school to see the flame pass through the village tries to remember the splendour of the day, he won’t be able to differentiate this real memory from the sixteen-thousand acid flashbacks also housed in his brain. ‘I’m sure it was a zombie Colonel Gaddafi running down the street with that flame. Just as the air strike hit.’

Anyway, maybe he can just re-read this blog and it’ll all come flooding back to him. The day was nice and bright and sunny, and the whole village was bustling with people waving flags, cracking jokes, and smiling and laughing, and generally having an awesome time. I dunno; maybe they were just drunk.

Normally if you saw a guy carrying a flaming torch through Skinflats, you’d expect the rest of the villagers to be right behind him with pitchforks shouting, ‘Burn the monster!’ Or, at the very least: ‘The Sun says there’s a paedo living somewhere within a fifty-mile radius. Let’s burn the fucker who moved into number 27 last week, just incase! Anyway, he said ‘hello’ to my daughter this morning, and that’s how it starts!’

But this day was different. Even the convoy of police bikes was greeted with warm, uproarious cheers. This struck me as odd. Like George Bush being carried through Baghdad by way of a jovial mass crowd-surf. Usually the arrival of police vehicles in Skinflats causes a mass exodus, or at the very least turns the village into a fortress: with every snib on every door clicking shut, and those behind the doors jamming them up with tables and wardrobes, and blacking out the windows, like they’re preparing to survive to the end of a zombie film.

The bike cops clearly thought they were the star attraction, as they gunned it down the street giving a series of wacky waves and salutes. One cop even gave a rolling five slap down a line of children’s hands. You might be cheering now, kids, but that’s the cunt who’ll be arresting you for cocaine possession in eight to ten years – which, coincidentally, will also be your sentence.

The best thing about the torch coming through Skinflats was the traffic chaos that preceded its arrival. A long jam of angry, self-conscious people all trapped in their cars, whilst a whole village peered at them. They must have felt like they’d gone for a day out at the safari park, and broken down in the lion enclosure. I tried to stare at as many of them as possible.

The Cunta-Cola truck.

It wasn’t long before a procession of yellow Olympic vehicles came trundling through the village. Lots of cars that looked like New York taxis. And the Coca Cola truck, of course, with a gang of reps walking beside it handing out free bottles of cola. Principles be damned: it was a hot day and I was thirsty. That freebie was gubbed. I know McDonalds sponsor the Olympics, too, and was a little annoyed that they hadn’t sent a truck laden with free beefburgers. Bank of Scotland had a truck in the procession, too, with some English cunt on its open top-deck dancing like a dick to shitty pop music. No free money getting handed out, I noticed.

Nice choice of sponsors for an international sporting event: Coca Cola, McDonalds, and Bank of Scotland. ‘Hey, kids. You’re all going to be fat bastards with diabetes and no pensions. LET’S FUCKING CELEBRATE!’

Eventually the guy with the flaming torch got off of his little yellow bus, jogged for about 100 metres, everybody cheered, and then he got back on his bus again, the lazy bastard. And I’m glad I was there to see it. One day I’ll be telling my grandkids about this. Telling them how shit it was. The free Cola was good, though.

This is the best picture I could manage!

* sincere apologies to the people of Skinflats. I love you all, you know I was only having a laugh (ie, please don’t kill me – I’m trying to put you on the map!).

** Note to foreign readers of the site, especially Americans. Skinflats genuinely is a lovely village, and also the birthplace of William Wallace, so do come visit if you’re flying in to Edinburgh. Thanks, Jamie.

Why Advertising is so Full of Shit

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'I'm chokin' it.'

Advertising: the art of taking something ordinary and building a mythology around it : the art of masking the brutality and nonsense behind the money.

Adverts. I wish they’d all just front up. Show us the whipped and weeping Chinese kids crying bitter tears over an assembly line of Barbie dolls. Show us an alcoholic drink-driving past a school with a bottle of Budweiser in his hand, swerving to avoid a mass of talking frogs and crashing into the school bus. Show us Ronald McDonald rabbit-punching an injured abattoir worker in the kidneys. It makes my head spin.

But it all makes me laugh, too. While shopping in Spar I came across something that made me guffaw uncontrollably. It was a slogan on the front of a Super Value Pack of KittenSoft toilet roll: ‘Irresistibly soft,’ it said.

'Itty Bitty Shitty Kitty.'

Has anyone ever found their toilet paper to be irresistible? ‘So Soft, You’ll Wipe After Every Fart,’ it seems to entreat. If we follow this line, it won’t be long before daddy is blowing his wage packet on luxury toilet roll items instead of heroin. Psssst. Want some Andrex, mate?

Ah, yes, Andrex: the crap-paper manufacturer that chose the puppy as its brand mascot. Puppies FIND the paper deliciously soft; the product is not AS soft AS puppies, a trap into which KittenSoft appears to have fallen. The implication from their packaging seems to be that using their product will have the equivalent feel to picking up Tiddles and sliding him between your arse cheeks like some kind of miaowing credit card. In fact, the little kitten on the packaging wears an expression somewhere between terror and hope, praying that today will be the last day he gets used as a BogMog.

Or a ShitKat, if you’d prefer.

'Go on, motherfucker, I dare ya.'

It makes me wonder whether the scientific wing of KittenSoft experimented with different creatures before settling on the kitten. Could we have had Total-Chinchilla-Comfort? HamsterWipe? Never mind if animals were harmed during the process: were any scientists harmed? ‘Can we just say a few words of remembrance for brave Ronald before we have a little re-think on HedgehogHeaven?’

And what criteria were used? Did they have a little check-list, sub-divided into animal groups and species, measuring things like fluffiness, absorbability, prickliness, and likelihood-of-biting-back-iness? And call me far too liberal-minded and PC for my own good, but things seem to be disgustingly mammal-centric over at toilet paper HQ. Kittens, puppies, tribbles. For once I’d like to see: ‘New SharkWipe – Something to Get Your Jaws around’; or ‘PythonWipe – For When You’ve Snaked One Out’. And why not give the amphibians and reptiles a chance to shine: ‘FrogComfort – So Tough You Won’t Ribbit?’ ‘Chod-in-the-Hole’?

I’m not even going to broach the subject, ladies and gentlemen, of Gerbil Lil-Ets.

New Stella-flavoured Deodorant a steaming success.

Ah, I really should have gone into advertising. A final word on deodorants. It seems that not smelling like filth isn’t good enough for us anymore. We have to stare at rows of peculiarly labelled scents ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous. On the shelves in Asda the other night (yes, I really do spend my free time skipping from shop to shop, frantically scanning the aisles for amusingly-named commercial products to brighten up my suicidally depressing existence) were deodorants called Java, Surge, Cool and Miami.

Java? Who the fuck wants to smell like a computer programming language? And what in Christ’s name does it smell of? I’ve seen computer programmers, and they don’t look like the kind of guys you’d want to be within sniffing distance of. As for Surge… I’m sure the smell of the surge rather depends on the kind of surge you’re talking about. Whatever the explanation, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to walk into work smelling of it.

A snapshot from Falkirk's premier nightspot.

And Miami? Hello? Did they huddle seven thousand Floridians into a warehouse, spraying chemicals at them from a giant shower-head until they all agreed on what Miami smelled like? ‘I couldn’t smell enough sunshine in that blast!’ ‘Give us a whiff of Mickey Mouse!’ ‘That one smelled far too much like Detroit!’

Where will it end? Scents called ‘One-Legged Welsh Gay’; ‘Recently Mouth-Raped Kangaroo‘? ‘Dead Peruvian’?

Next week, look out for the launch of my new toilet paper: ‘ARSEWIPE – You Can Clean the Shit From Your Arsehole With It’.