Avatar Jolly Good: free gingerbread

In these trying times, we’re all hearing more than enough that worries, frightens or discombobulates us. To ease your worries, calm your nerves and recombobulate your addled mind, I’ve decided to make a regular habit of posting good news.

Here’s the first hit of happy headlines. Strap in.

I was in Greggs this morning to get some breakfast, having spent the night away from home. After I placed my order, the barista (being from London I assume the people behind the counter are baristas, like in Cafe Nero) asked me “do you like gingerbread?”

That’s not a difficult question. “I do”, I replied.

He put a gingerbread man in a little bag and put it on the counter with my order. “Here you go,” he said. “That’s free.”

When I asked about this gingerbread generosity, he explained that head office had – for no reason he could see – sent him about 200 extra gingerbread men and he’d never be able to sell them all. So he was just handing them out to anyone who wanted one.

Admittedly my free gingerbread man has distressingly fat legs, and has been given icing and smarties in a particularly slapdash way, almost as though the person adding his buttons had 200 of them to do and thought they might all end up in the bin, but all in all this is an absolute win. Hurrah!

15 comments on “Jolly Good: free gingerbread

  • This is a net win if ever I read one. Well done to you, not in a patronising way, but in a “you were definitely in the right place at the right time” kind of way.

    If it were me, I would have asked for three.

  • You would, wouldn’t you? But I didn’t because that’s not my style. I wish I had now because Greggs is closed, along with everything else, and everyone is dead.

  • And all you have left to remember them by is the crumbs of a free ginny bread man. Leonard Cohen could write a song about that.

  • I don’t think he could. He’s dead. The rate at which he was turning out smashing pop hits took a steep downward turn at the point when he died.

  • Never say never. The power of Leonardingtons Coheningtons is pretty strong and I would not write-off him releasing a new album posthumously, possibly one involving free baked goods. Knowing our luck though he’ll have tossed one off about a steak and kidney pie instead. Typical.

  • Leonardingtons Coheningtons, or “Loggo Coggo” as I often call him, didn’t often go to Greggs, but he did enjoy a McDonalds apple pie fairly regularly. He wrote that song, Blackbird on the Wire, about them, though he changed all the words to be about something depressing so that it was less obvious.

  • And piping hot. If anything comes through when listening to “Blackbird on the Wire” it’s the sense of having the roof of your mouth burned horribly by a sudden blast of steam.

  • Come to think of it:

    “If I, if I have been unkind,
    I hope that you can eat an apple pie,
    If I, if I have been untrue
    I hope it’s cooked all the way through”

  • That’s the one. Now you see. If you were ever lucky enough to sit near the front of a Loggo Coggo concert, you’d have seen he had a line of Maccy D’s apple pies along the top of his piano so he could have a little munch between songs. He frickin’ loved them.

  • Is that why there’s always that fleeting pause in ‘Dance Me to the End of Love’? Is he chompy chompy chew chewing on an apple pie?

  • 2003? It says it was uploaded in 2008. Can you see five years into the future? If so, why did you watch a video of a pair of teeth when you could have been looking up lottery numbers?

  • It was on a DVD we had back in 2003. It came with the album Fake Songs by Liam Lynch.

    I can, obviously, see five years into the future now, but only precisely five years, not more or less. Five years from now it looks like a fairly normal day.

  • Oh him. Yeah, Liam “funny for five minutes” Lynch.

    I’ll hold you to that. Anything other than a fairly normal day and you’ll feel the wrath of *counts* 41 year old me and a tepid text / Whatsapp message that’s for sure.

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