LUV & HAT

LUV - Fix up, look sharp - it’s the Jubilee again. I know, I know. You’re sick to the eye-teeth* of Jubilees. Every ten years it’s Jubilee this, and Jubilee that. But this Jubilee is special - you see, it’s not the Golden Jubilee - where the Queen celebrated 50 years on the throne - which sounds like a terrible constipation metaphor. It’s not the Silver Jubilee where she famously celebrated the cinematic release of the first** Star Wars movie, and it’s not the Paper Jubilee, which happened when the Queen was a bit friskier, and it was just an excuse to get wasted on poppers and snog that Greek fella by the bins.

We’ve all had Jubilees like that, haven’t we, ladies.

Anyway, this is the Diamond Jubilee, which celebrates the Queen’s 60th year on the throne, and just look how excited she is about it!

Just look at those shiny, shiny eyes. Those are the eyes of someone who’s seen the Duke of Edinburgh clenching on a golden toilet. For sixty years. Those are the eyes of someone who knows they’re going to have to sit through at least twenty minutes of JLS.

Those eyes deserve a party, don’t they?

And what a party. I mean, first the Queen is going to Epsom for a spot of horse racing. That’s Epsom, Surrey! Just imagine. Then she’s going to the Diamond Jubilee River Pageant, where she will lead a flotilla of a thousand boats in a magnificent re-enaction of the film Battleship. The Queen will play Rihanna.

Later, thousands of Jubilee beacons will be lit, culminating in the Queen ritualistically setting fire to Piers Morgan on a spit, and finally there will be the concert at Buckingham Palace, featuring acts that are right up the Queen’s alley, like Jessie J and Ed Sheeran. Cunningly, the Queen has arranged it so that the concert faces away from Buckingham Palace. This is so that the Queen can send a decoy queen to the concert, just like Queen Amidala in the fourth*** Star Wars film. Except, instead of defending her planet from attack, the Queen will be retiring to bed with a bottle of Jim Beam and a swan firmly plugged in each ear.

The next day there’s a carriage procession, where the Queen will doze beneath her hat, nibble on the bacon sandwich she’s stuffed up her sleeve and murmur “man, I so caned it last night” to the Duke of Edinburgh.

Other things the Queen is doing for her Diamond Jubilee:

1. Decreeing that we ALL MUST HAVE LUNCH on Sunday
2. Making bunting THE LAW
3. Giving us an extra day off, but clogging up London and most of the thoroughfares so we can’t travel, and not letting broadcasters put anything interesting on TV, so we are forced to stay home and endure CONVERSATION
4. Inventing Facebook.

On yer, your Maj.

* Whatever they are.
** First movie. Episode IV. Whatever, nerds.
*** Oh my god BITE me.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - In a way, the Diamond Jubilee makes perfect sense. A woman has kept the same job for 60 years. That’s impressive by anyone’s standards. And so what if the Queen’s job basically involves travelling the world and eating swans and trying not to grimace too much when dirty-faced provincial children hand her tatty flowers and unconvincingly feigning grief whenever a relative dies? Doing that for 60 years is an achievement. It should be marked.

But here’s the thing: I bet the Queen hates the Diamond Jubilee. I bet she properly bloody hates it. I bet it fucks around with her day something rotten. All she wants to do is sit at home watching the Liz Earle Colour Cosmetics hour on QVC, but no. She has to get on a poxy boat and spend four hours waving at idiots. She has to pretend that she’s never seen a bloody flypast before. And, worst of all, she’s got to host a fucking concert in her back garden.

Last time was bad enough. For her Golden Jubilee, the Queen had to put up with Paul McCartney singing a thirteen-hour-long version of Hey Jude and that hairy twonk from Queen basically just having a wank on her roof. But this year will be worse. Because this year she has to put up with Gary Fucking Barlow as well.

Imagine it. You’re trying to have a nice day and then Gary Fucking Barlow - a man who wants a knighthood so badly that it’s all he can do not to shit himself at the merest thought of it - sidles up.

“Ooh, that’s a nice blouse your majesty,” he’ll say. Or “Do you like this special song I wrote for you, ma’am?”. Or “Mhhng-mmmh-nunnng-mhfhmm?” as he tries to fit his entire tongue all the way up your fucking bumhole. It’d be awful. Gary Fucking Barlow will ruin the Jubilee for the Queen.

But I don’t just hate the Jubilee because of Gary Barlow. I hate it because of all the opportunistic shit that’s suddenly popped up everywhere. You can’t buy a plate that hasn’t got a Union Jack on it. You can’t buy a cushion that hasn’t got a Union Jack on it. You can’t go into a shopping centre any more without feeling like you’ve accidentally set foot inside a terrifyingly sterile BNP rally.

But the worst thing about the Diamond Jubilee - the very worst thing about anything - is this: the Sainsbury’s Mr & Mrs Jubilee gingerbread men. Just look at it:



For the rest of my life, this is what the Diamond Jubilee will represent: a pair of vast, orange, bald, no-neck weirdos staring down at me with their unblinking boggly eyes - her with a tiny dress Sellotaped to the front of her naked body and him in a pair of nightmarish transparent trousers with a colossal wad of jizz splashed across his blood-coloured tunic. I won’t ever get any more sleep for the rest of my life thanks to Mr & Mrs Jubilee. Thanks a fucking lot, the Queen. You idiot.
- Stuart Heritage

LUV - If Groupon had its shit together, it’d shelve all those “chocolate experience days” where you file into a sterile room and a stern woman shouts at you about the discovery of the cocoa bean then makes you do a bunch of trust exercises using melted chocolate and marshmallows that you’re NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO EAT. If Groupon knew the first THING about chocolate, it would forget all that rubbish and just dump a truckload of starving, premenstrual, unsupervised women into a branch of Hotel Chocolat, shout “THERE ARE NO RULES” through a megaphone, lock the doors and drive away.

And it’d make a fortune.

Because just imagine having the run of a Hotel Chocolat shop. Imagine gorging on – and then building a fort out of - giant slabs of marbled dark and white chocolate. Imagine rolling around in piles of chocolate-enrobed maraschino cherries and showering yourself with handfuls of salted caramel puddles. It’d be wonderful. It’d be a mess. It’d be a glutton’s paradise.

Hotel Chocolat is the closest thing that we have to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.

I mean, what do you get the minute you set foot in any Hotel Chocolat anywhere in the world? That’s right, FREE CHOCOLATE. Someone will sidle up to you with a tray of fancy chocolates and offer you one, sadly – as though you’d be doing them a MASSIVE FAVOUR by taking one off their hands and/or you have a terminal disease.

And Hotel Chocolat shops are always so lovely and boutiquey. But not like a beauty boutique where you’re instantly intimidated by the price and packaging, or like Pretty Woman-style Rodeo Drive clothes shops where Julia Roberts tries to buy a dress but the snotty assistants are all I’M SORRY MISS I DON’T BELIEVE WE HAVE ANY DRESSES THAT EVEN FIT YOUR VAGINA. Hotel Chocolat is that rare thing, an INCLUSIVE boutique, and there’s nothing to be intimidated by because, well, it’s chocolate. It might be chilli chocolate, or balls of chocolate that have been dyed a mottled pink and look uncomfortably like human testicles, but it’s still chocolate, it’s delicious, and everyone’s pleased as punch about the whole idea.

Two more brilliant things about Hotel Chocolat:

1. There is actually A HOTEL CHOCOLAT. It’s a luxury spa hotel in St Lucia with an infinity pool, chocolate-themed restaurant and stuff like “cocoa pedicure” on the spa menu.

2. Hotel Chocolat is branching out from chocolate. It does chocolate balsamic vinegar and chocolate olive oil now. It does chocolate mustard. Next: chocolate WD-40, chocolate dildoes and chocolate tampons. What? Too far?

- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Why does Hotel Chocolat employ people to swan around its branches with trays of complimentary chocolate? It needn’t bother. People don’t go to Hotel Chocolat to sample its marzipan ingots, you know. There is one reason, and one reason alone, why anyone has ever been to a branch of Hotel Chocolat.

It’s because they’re shit at presents.

We’ve all been there. It’s your birthday. A friend hands you a gift. You unwrap it in a flurry of breathless excitement only to discover that - oh - it’s a Hotel Chocolat slab. Silently, you make a solemn vow to gouge them out of your life them at the earliest possible opportunity.

Because a Hotel Chocolat slab isn’t just a Hotel Chocolat slab, is it? It’s a sign that your friend didn’t know what else to get you. It means they either don’t know you very well, or they just couldn’t be arsed to think. A decade ago, you’d have got a basket of fruit-scented Body Shop soap, but now it’s a Hotel Chocolate slab. Well fuck them. They don’t deserve you, the shitty gift-giving wazzocks.

You didn’t get this with Thorntons, you know. True, Thorntons chocolate tended to be so stuffed with cream that your heart would splutter and burst after a couple of mouthfuls, but at least they’d write someone’s name on an Easter egg with icing if you asked them nicely enough. It was harder to convince them to ice a cock and balls on anything, admittedly, but at least they put a bit of fucking effort in.

And then there’s that fucking name to deal with. I live in South London. How the tits am I supposed to pronounce Hotel Chocolat? My instinct is to call it ‘Hotel Chocolate’, with an E on the end, but that sounds too deliberately artless. The alternative is to go full-on French with it, cocking an eyebrow and murmuring ‘Oh-teyl Shhocolatte’ in the way that the founders probably intended.

But you know who does that? You know who breaks their normal English accent to pronounce foreign words in a foreign accent? Cunts, that’s who. Everyone you’ve ever hated, that’s who. And that’s why I’ve only ever been able to self-consciously mumble ‘Hotel Chok-o-lat’ in the most noncommittal way possible whenever I’ve referred to it. Why couldn’t they have just called themselves HOTEL CHOCOLATE or CHOCOSHACK or HOUSE OF QUITE POSH ROLOS?

Finally - and I feel that I should address this directly to Hotel Chocolat itself - YOU ONLY SELL CHOCOLATE, YOU BELLENDS. You don’t sell rubies or jetskis or unicorns. It’s just chocolate. Stop being such ponces about it. Stop naming your boxes The Signature Collection. Start calling them Just Some Fucking Chocolate In A Box That I’ll Give To Someone I Don’t Really Give A Shit About or something. Nobody would mind. In fact, they’d probably prefer it.

And that is why I hate Hotel Chocolat. That said, if my dad is reading this, he should probably ignore the third and fourth paragraph. Father’s Day is coming up and he’s really difficult to buy for.
- Stuart Heritage

LUV - This summer, barbecues are going to be brilliant. Listen. Stop looking at me like that. YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND, I used to be a VEGETARIAN.

Do you know how hard it is to be a vegetarian at a barbecue? To turn up to some stranger’s house and have everything go quiet until finally someone sighs and says “Barry, get the salad” as you try to disappear into the bunting? Because who even HAS a barbecue anymore? Not real people. Only the cousin of your boyfriend’s boss’s wife’s ex-flatmate from their BRILLIANT RADA DAYS DO YOU REMEMBER ANNA. And everyone’s wearing Boden and all the garden furniture is teak, all the women have crinkly cleavages, and all the men are called Keith and keep topping up your Pimms even though it tastes of evil and cucumbers, and when you tell them your name they all say HO HO THE VEGETARIAN EH, then someone in a Cath Kidston apron hands you a plate containing a blackened Quorn burger, a slice of quiche hauled from the Freezer Drawer of Ancient Forgotten Food, fucking roasted fucking vegetables on fucking ciabatta and, absolutely without exception, squashed wasp salad.

But those days are behind me now, because now I am an OMNIVORE and I have a BALCONY.

I’m going to do barbecues RIGHT this year. First of all I’m going to hold mine in FEBRUARY, because I’ve studied you outdoorsy meat eaters and unbridled optimism in the face of an approaching cold front is apparently the way to go. Then I will buy all the meat in the world and one of those shitty tinfoil throwaway barbecues from a petrol station even though I know the end result will be like trying to roast an elephant over a tea light, but I figure I’ll be wearing a KISS THE COOK apron so it’ll be okay. Next I will fill the balcony with toxic black smoke so that the neighbours complain, the firemen are called but, most importantly - the guests will be herded together in uncomfortable proximity so they have to make falsely jolly, stilted conversation about the weather. Which will then TURN. Rain will lash the balcony and dilute everyone’s Pimms and we’ll all be forced inside to play Wii Tennis and microwave all the meat instead, and my flat will start to smell like Gunther von Hagens’ laboratory. Finally everyone will erupt with bacterial norovirus and my flat will start to smell like Gunther von Hagens’ toilet, and that’s when I’ll know I’m doing barbecues like a normal.

I can’t wait.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Oh, you poor idiots. It might be May, but that doesn’t mean that it’s summer. Just because it hasn’t rained for a nanosecond and there’s a hat-wearing mannequin doing a thumbs-up in a manky yellow T-shirt in the window of River Island, it doesn’t mean that you’re allowed to wear sandals yet. Or sunglasses. And it definitely means you’re not allowed to have a fucking barbecue.

It especially means that you’re not allowed to have a barbecue. It means that you’re not allowed to have a barbecue ever. Because, look, it’s 2012. We don’t need to cook burgers outside any more. We can cook them indoors now. We can go and buy them ready-cooked. We can travel to Japan and make little tiny ones out of POWDER. Why would I ever want to go and cook them outside? I work from home. Outside scares me and, besides, it’d mean putting a pair of pants on. No thank you.

Oh sure, barbecues might lull you in by smelling nice, but that’s no guarantee of anything. Popcorn smells nice, but it tastes like plastic foam. The scalp of a newborn baby apparently smells wonderful, but everyone knows that babies grow up to be criminals and murderers and abhorrently selfish lovers. And this is just as true of the barbecue. It might smell vaguely appealing when it wafts in on a warm breeze from a distance, but that’s only because you can’t see the torrent of abject fucking misery that it’s causing everyone.

You can’t see how red-eyed and squinty everyone is from the giant cloud of smoke that keeps following them around. You can’t hear all the stilted smalltalk they all have to endure because there isn’t a telly for them to watch. You can’t see everyone rush inside to find a coat or a blanket or a rug or some bubble wrap or anything, because the sun’s gone behind a cloud and it’s become legitimately freezing. You can’t see people struggling to mask their dismay at the blackened, inedible, osmium-dense 5p-sized puck of a burger that they’ve balanced in the middle of a bun as big as a dinner plate. You can’t see them praying that they won’t contract salmonella after every single bite of a chicken leg that doesn’t feel quite warm enough in the middle. And, most importantly, you can’t see ALL THE FUCKING WASPS.

So if you’re planning a barbecue for the coming months, good luck. You deserve everything you’ll get - which includes but is not limited to pneumonia, smoke inhalation, boredom-induced catatonia, hunger, stomach cramps, whatever that thing is where you drink too much room-temperature supermarket own brand lager and then can only taste rusty metal for the rest of the day and an endless, chronic, exhausting, week-long, bout of uncontrollable spurting double-ended, red-hot liquid food poisoning.

No, you’re welcome.
-Stuart Heritage

LUV - You what I’m sick of? Using my brain. All day long it’s people and words and stress and lists and bits of paper and meetings and books that you don’t remember you’re not really into until you open them on the train home and compromise and reports and SOMETIMES I JUST WANT TO LOOK AT A PICTURE OF A DRESS.

Followed by a picture of some cupcakes.

And then a kitten.

And maybe a tray of macarons, only macarons that look as though they were photographed in the 1970s, and a neo-Nordic industrial-Georgian living room, and a bunny, and some sketches of nothing, and some inspirational haiku, and some flowers, and maybe a popular sarcastic cartoon that I don’t really get and OH LOOK AT THAT PUPPY.

I call it a Cascade of Loveliness, and sometimes a Cascade of Loveliness is the one thing that can smooth down the rough edges of my workaday world when I am feeling needled.

Sometimes I can induce a Cascade of Loveliness by going clothes shopping and touching the clothes and seeing all the different colours and blissing out in a textile-based trance. However, coming-to in a fitting room to see my bloated reflection looming yellowly out of the mirror and asking me how the hell I plan to get it out of these paisley size 2 cycling shorts somehow undoes all that good work.

What I really want is a context-free, constantly updating, infinite stream of PICTURES OF LOVELY THINGS.

Which is why Pinterest is so brilliant.

You just set up an account, follow some people, then sit back as LOVELY THINGS scroll gently down the page all calm and beautifully arranged. Handmade jewellery from Etsy. A crocheted cape. Some aged white floorboards. A cake someone made. ALL the cakes EVERYONE made. Some jeans you might like. A recipe for brioche. All this laps at your tired brain like a fragrant pink sea until you feel better. Then, if you see something you like, you can “pin” it to YOUR feed for YOUR followers, and they can feed it to THEIR followers, and so on until the internet blossoms into a spiralling pink Mandelbrot set of women sighing happily at their computers for no real reason.

Technically, Pinterest is an image-driven social bookmarking site - only instead of bookmarking protein bars you want to buy, or motivational TED talks that you think could uphance your monetivation, you’re bookmarking whoopee pie recipes and Cath Kidston aprons.

Basically, Pinterest is Del.icio.us, but for Zooey Deschanel.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - No. Just no. Just fucking… I mean, Pinterest? No. Fucking no. I hate Pinterest. I hate everything about Pinterest. I hate how it looks. I hate how it works. I hate the word ‘Pinterest’. If you’ve signed up to Pinterest, then I hate you. In fact, the only things stopping me from coming over there and punching your jaw off for having a Pinterest account right now are a) I don’t know where you live, and b) even if I did, there’s a strong statistical likelihood that you’ve got a mural of a fucking cupcake on your living room wall.

Look, you dicks. There’s already too much social media in the world without signing up to another pile of awful, time-consuming, mimsying, pale pink, Bello Script poncery. There’s so much social media that some people actually do it for a fucking job. Imagine that. Imagine that your job basically involves going on Twitter and writing “Hey everyone, Branston Pickle still exists! Woo!” 12 times a fucking day. Imagine doing that for a living. You’d want to kill yourself, wouldn’t you? You’d want to fling yourself under anything capable of squishing your miserable torso into marmalade. When people do social media for a job, it’s a pretty good sign that there’s too much social media.

And even despite this - even despite the whirling mountain of arseishness that passes for social media - Pinterest represents the absolute pinnacle of dreadful cuntery. Because, you know, it’s just Tumblr. It’s just Tumblr in a grid. And Tumblr is already woeful enough. Look, there are already enough Instagrammed pictures of sad girls holding balloons on the internet. There are already enough bullshit sub-Hallmark quotes about believing in your potential on the internet. There are already enough sunrises and rainbows and fucking moonbeams and poxy fucking screengrabs from the ending of fucking Titanic on the internet. There are already enough impractical recipes for dreadful fucking brownies on the internet. There are already enough cats on the internet. There are too many cats on the internet. When I see a cat in real life now, I want to throw it down a well. You know whose fault that is? It’s your fucking fault, you cat-liking internet dickheads.

But, no. You had to fucking sign up to Pinterest, didn’t you? Because you needed an invite, and that made it seem exclusive. Even though all you needed to do was go on Twitter and say “Can I have a Pinterest invite?”, you still think you’re part of some brilliant rah-rah club where everyone gets as many Deepak fucking Chopra quotes as they can eat and nobody minds if you write down every single fucking passing fucking ambient thought that passes through your fucking head. But you’re not. It’s just a website. A website for bellends.

Now, MySpace? THAT’s the future.
- Stuart Heritage

LUV - I cop a lot of shit for liking EastEnders, but fuck you. EastEnders is brilliant. It’s brilliant because it knows exactly what a soap should be.

It’s grey. It’s flat. It’s oppressively miserable. It’s full of pallid, squalid, dirty-looking urchins who ricochet from disaster to hopeless disaster and then eventually die of scurvy. Nobody has ever smiled on EastEnders. If they have, it’s only been to offer a glimmer of false hope because they’re about to be bludgeoned to death by an alcoholic prostitute for their chip money. Every episode of EastEnders is a half-hour Requiem For A Dream written by a blind, sunlight-deprived orphan with cholera. And it’s fucking brilliant.

No, really, it is. Shut up. You can’t compare EastEnders with an American soap. Americans are dreadful at soaps. Admittedly Americans are dreadful at plenty of things - like making tea and pronouncing the word ‘mirror’ without sounding like they’re having some sort of catastrophic stroke - but they’re most dreadful at soaps. American soaps are full of chiseled billionaires called Chad and fluorescent walking cleavages who live in mansions and own speedboats and are occasionally happy. Who’d want to watch shit like that? Happiness? Fuck off.

Instead, it’s better to compare EastEnders to something like Lost. No, it is. It is. Shut up. Like Lost, the cast of EastEnders are all trapped in one location with no hope of escape. Once, someone might have sporadically made it as far away as Manchester, but that portal closed long ago. If you’re on EastEnders now, you’re doomed to stay there until a drunk driver mows you down or Phil Mitchell sets you on fire or you can abduct enough newborn babies to qualify for the relative utopia of a psychiatric care unit.

Plus, just like Lost, everyone on EastEnders has really been dead all along. Of course they have. That’s why they all look so decomposed.

Seriously, I bloody love EastEnders. Only EastEnders could take a pleasant young deaf boy with a penchant for elaborate Lady Gaga choreography and turn him into a lunatic so terrifying that he’ll inevitably end up reenacting the last scene of Kill List in the middle of the square, dancing and covered in blood and laughing at his own hands. Only EastEnders could insinuate that crack addiction really, really makes you like The Who. Only EastEnders could assume that Shane Richie would be able to function normally in public without being booted in the crotch on an hourly basis.

I love EastEnders because it makes me feel better about my life. Even if I was getting slowly digested by a ravenous komodo dragon, one look at Ian Beale being ground down by his miserable existence would be enough to ensure that I’d spend the rest of the day whistling chirpily. I’d whistle until the komodo dragon shat me out. That’s how much I love EastEnders. Fuck you.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - I don’t watch EastEnders. You know why? I don’t NEED to. I live IN London. I got real life EastEnders going on all up in here. If I want to see someone shout “NO I AIN’T” or sadly whisper “and that’s when I done him in the head with a tea tray”, all I have to do is go outside and walk around for a bit.

I live in London, I’m keeping it real, I have no need of your so-called EastEnders.

And EastEnders is bullshit. Will.i.am could probably do a more gritty and realistic portrayal of inner city London life. Because EastEnders relies on actors whose specialisms at the Italia Conti School were jazz-mime and slam-boogaloo to emote their way through abortions, blackmail, murder, addiction and Shane Richie four times a week.

And if I want to see noncommittal moments of tenderness I’ll just watch a dog sadly scrape his arse across the grave of a man who died from eating too many Wimpy burgers. If I want to suffer thirty minutes of bitter-yet-bland kitchen sink melodramatics, I’ll just wait till Christmas and talk to someone’s drunken divorced aunty who has an axe to grind, a steel trap for a memory, all the chocolate liqueurs and NO BOUNDARIES.

EastEnders schmeastenders.

If EastEnders were a magazine it’d be one of those primary-coloured, exclamation-mark true-life gossip mags, only it’d come out four times a week, it’d be grey, and stuffed with stories like “TOO THICK TO REALISE MY BABY WAS SWAPPED” and “MY NICK’S A GOOD BOY REALLY”. And when you lifted your hand off each page it’d come away sticky, because when I watch EastEnders, my SOUL comes away sticky.

Incidentally, while we’re comparing soaps to magazines, Emmerdale is the soap version of The People’s Friend, and Coronation Street is basically TV Quick. No one has yet made a soap that’s like the right-hand column of the Daily Mail website, though, but when they do, I will sit down and WATCH that soap. Forever.

Ultimately, even though Eastenders’ scenes of high drama are a bit like an Argos version of King Lear, they stuff about 37.5 of those scenes in EVERY EPISODE, and I simply don’t have the sort of spangly, bubble-filled Zooey Deschanel Gummi Bear bullshit optimism to withstand them. That’s why I don’t watch EastEnders.

Oh, and also because if I WANT to watch people making uncomfortable references to Twitter and Lady Gaga, I’ll just GO on Twitter and TALK TO Lady Gaga.
- Robyn Wilder

LUV - It’s hard to trust people who don’t like pasties, isn’t it? It’s hard to look at them, and their tiny mouths and their monocles and their ridiculous cutlery infatuation, with anything other than outright disgust.

After all, these people have never walked to the garage at dinnertime and bought enough Ginsters spicy chicken slices to give themselves a weaponised dose of acid reflux. They’ve never experienced the joy of biting into a railway station pasty and then trying to politely style out the agonising third degree burns that they’ve sustained across their mouth, tongue and oesophegus.

They’ve never known the giddy high of walking into a branch of Greggs and just spinning around again and again, all big-eyed with their arms outstretched and the chorus to Native New Yorker blaring in their heads, until they’re asked to leave by a grumpy woman in an apron. They lead grey, drab, joyless lives punctuated only by the sound of their own miserly sobbing. Under no circumstances should they ever be trusted.

But I’m not one of these people. My dedication to pasties is pure and enduring. My first job involved selling pasties, and I’d live for the moment when I could go home at the end of each day, strip naked, curl up into a ball and just inhale the heady mixture of grease, pastry, glaze and sausagemeat that had permeated every cell in my body. Some days, I swear I could see little tiny clumps of mechanically-reclaimed meat clogging up each individual pore on my naked, shivering, teenage torso. Truly, they were the happiest days of my life.

Sure, pasty love isn’t all plain sailing. Sometimes there’s more pastry than filling. Sometimes there’s barely any filling at all. Sometimes you’re so drunk that you’ll believe a cup of West Cornwall Pasty Co potato wedges will be a delicious accompaniment to your pasty and not an inedible pile of vegetable scab. Sometimes Sainsbury’s will bring out a pasty with a chicken fajita filling and you’ll briefly think that it might be quite nice and you’ll be wrong and you’ll end up staring mournfully at yourself in the mirror and mouthing the word ‘why?’ over and over and wondering what the hell has happened to you.

But your love for pasties is never misplaced. When a pasty is done right, there’s nothing greater in all the world. You hold a pasty in your hands, like you’d hold a newborn baby or your loved one, and it makes you warm. You already know this, of course, because you already like pasties. You know that they’re the purest reflection of love that this planet has to offer.

Robyn Wilder, on the other hand, doesn’t. She is not one of us. She doesn’t understand. What she is about to say will undoubtedly make you angry, but try not to lash out at her. She doesn’t like pasties because she simply doesn’t understand. Better to pity her and her empty life, instead.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - The problem with pasties is that the very best that they can ever hope to do is whelm you.

Like salad, porridge and Scotch eggs, pasties fall into that grey area of foodstuffs that are just sort of okay. Pasties are all right. They’ll do. In fact, they’re so all right that if you ask a hungry person if they want a pasty they’ll consider it for a moment and then actually say the words “YEAH, ALL RIGHT”.

Pasties are just some fatty STUFF in a stodgy THING. If they were a bigger deal, everyone who works at Greggs would be called a maître pastierre. Everyone on Come Dine With Me would serve pasties for hors d’oeuvres instead of FUCKING BRUSCHETTA AGAIN. And Mr Ginster would be a knight of the realm.

But the sad fact is that no one has ever said the phrase “hooray a pasty!” or expressed a preference for a pasty over something else, unless the other option they were offered was a smack in the mouth.

Because pasties are a bit rubbish.

And I don’t say this out of ignorance - I’ve had all sorts of pasties. Supermarket pasties, which are basically twelve bites of pastry-encased emptiness and one of gristle. Petrol station pasties, which you either eat in your car or alone in an underpass while a tramp wees in the corner. A proper Cornish pasty in proper Cornwall - actually in Tintagel, King Arthur’s birthplace, in a place called (and this is true) King Arthur’s Car Park. It was hot and flaky and tasteless. AND THE PASTY WAS A BIT DISAPPOINTING, TOO LOL. And one time I was at Leeds station eating a pork and apple pasty from the West Cornwall Pasty Company - I remember it because I was there with David Cameron, only I’ve never been to Leeds and the pasty that David Cameron was eating was imaginary.

The worst thing about pasties is that the best thing about them isn’t true. Pasties were historically Cornish coal miners’ packed lunches - and I grew up hearing the legend  that half the pasty was savoury BUT THE OTHER WAS SWEET - like an apple pie. Which sounds a bit brilliant. But that’s not the case at all - that’s Bedfordshire clangers, not Cornish pasties. So pasties aren’t just bland rubbish, THEY ALSO LIE.

Actually, that’s not the worst thing about pasties. This is the worst thing about pasties:

Smash Ya Pasty is a slang word of North East England origin which means a man will have sex with a women very well,so much that the women will feel like there vagina has been literally smashed.

“man,i smashed her pasty so bad yesterday, she shit everywhere….kept shagging her though”

Bon appetit!
- Robyn Wilder

LUV - I have a lot of love for jeggings. In fact, I love them so much that immediately after I typed that first sentence I went online and BOUGHT SOME JEGGINGS. Because, make no mistake, jeggings are way cool. Yeah, I just said “way cool”; yeah, I’m an adult. Get over it, Grandma - jeggings are so immense that they turn the world of social acceptability on its head. COWABUNGA.

But first, in case my mum or any men are reading, let me clarify what I’m talking about here:

Jeggings: Stretchy leggings made of, or designed to resemble (often not terribly well), denim.

And what’s to love about them? Fucking loads:

THE NAME
Well, firstly, the word itself. Jeggings. What a brilliant collection of noises. Jeggings. It sounds like a new style of knife crime, or 80s night at a working men’s club in the Wirral. But it also complements words like “Jedward” and “acid wash” and “fugly”. “Jeggings” perfectly evokes the spirit of the times we live in, and then gives it camel-toe.

THEY’RE COMFORTABLE 
Look, sometimes you want to eat pizza, yeah? Sometimes you want to eat ALL the pizza, AND all the sides, and chug two full litres of Coke so you can recite the names of everyone in One Direction in one unbroken burp. Historically, though, you haven’t been able to do this while wearing skinny jeans for fear of creating a muffin-top so unstable it threatens to ping the very rivets off your jeans and INTO YOUR EYES. However, with jeggings you can have it all! There’s no fly, no rivets - just an elasticated waist. So you can hoover up all the pizza and a tub of Phish Food, and still stalk moodily down Electric Avenue in your constricting denim looking all the world like a gassy, distended Frankie Cocozza. Hooray for jeggings!

SOMETIMES IT’S NICE TO SEE OTHER WOMEN’S VAGINAS
I don’t know about you, but sometimes I forget I even have a vagina. I might as well have a turnip there for all the attention I give it. So when I walk down the street and see a woman in a crop-top displaying the crotch of a pair of jeggings so tight that I can count all her pubes and every single one of her remaining eggs, I stop. I stop and thank that woman for reminding me about my own vagina. For reminding me about every woman’s vagina. And when that happens I like to think that Emmeline Pankhurst is looking down at me from heaven, and smiling. And wearing a pair of jeggings.
- Robyn Wilder

HAT - Given the opportunity to travel back in time, most people would either kill Hitler or - if they’re Michael J Fox - go and tongue-kiss the arse off their mum. But this is a mistake. That’s partly because Hitler ended up inventing the speedboat or whatever, but it’s also because there are far more important people to target.

Me? I’d murder the pregnant mother of whoever first used the word ‘spork’. I’m not being cruel. If she knew that her adorable baby would one day grow up to promote the usage of needlessly awkward portmanteaus, that poor woman would have almost definitely flung herself into a furnace at the point of childbirth like Sigourney Weaver in Alien 3.

She’d know that after the word spork would come the word camcorder. And then the word metrosexual. And then after that, people would suddenly begin to interrupt their advertecture webinars to joygasm about the upcycled liger-print skort they saw Jedward wearing on the Brangelina informercial while they were chillaxing over their turducken brunch, and nobody would be able to go more than about three seconds without bursting into tears at the fucking hollow pointless abject screaming futility of everything that their lives have come to represent.

And then, after all of that, would come jeggings. Fucking jeggings. Most people think that the word jeggings is a portmanteau of ‘jeans’ and ‘leggings’. They’re wrong. It’s actually a portmanteau of ‘Jesus christ I’m probably history’s most obnoxious turd-fountain’ and ‘This is why I’m about to create a cross between jeans and leggings’.

Perhaps the problem here is that I just don’t understand jeggings. I think, in theory, they’re supposed to combine the stylishness of jeans with the comfort of leggings, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. Most of the time, the only thing that jeggings seem to combine are the stylishness of pyjama bottoms with a gaping cameltoe so obscenely vast that you could comfortably park an entire fleet of battleships up there.

Jeggings represent the very first step on a slippery slope. You might start off by thinking “Oh, I’m just going to the supermarket, I’ll wear jeggings instead of actual jeans” but soon it’ll be “Oh, I’m just going to the supermarket, I’ll wear my dressing gown instead of jeggings”. And then “I can’t be bothered going to the supermarket, I’ll just lie in bed wearing this muumuu made of that tarpaulin they used to cover the church roof and order a pizza, and ask the pizza place to put my pizza in a blender and bring it to me in a plastic beaker so I don’t have to chew it, and then my genitals will gradually retreat behind my obscene folds of skin and then I’ll die and the council will have to remove my corpse through a wall with a crane”.

Jeggings are awful. They’re the tuxedo T-shirt of horrible shit that lazy people wear on their legs. They should all be destroyed. Or at called something that isn’t jeggings. Or at least modified to cover up that yawning fucking cameltoe you’ve got going on. Honestly, you look obscene.
- Stuart Heritage

LUV - This is the last fucking thing I want to admit. Mums bake things. Nans bake things. Worse still, awful Shoreditchy internet wankers with blue hair, a fondness for overpriced cocktails and an obnoxious ironic infatuation with burlesque like baking. Baking is for that dreadful woman off the telly who lives in a Parisian shoebox and wears vintage dresses and blinks a lot and only communicates in whalesong. Baking is for people who can use the term ‘shabby chic’ without immediately trying to murder themselves. Baking, let’s make this perfectly clear, is for cunts.

And for me, a bit. Look, I know. Shut up. Shut up.

Obviously when I bake, it’s different. When I bake, I need to to retain the sole anaemic scrap of masculinity left in my wizened excuse for a body, so I adhere to a strict set of rules devised exclusively to stop me from turning into Sophie Fucking Dahl. These rules include:

NO CUPCAKES. I will never ever, under any circumstances, bake a cupcake. Ever. Cupcakes are for weaklings and sissies. Cupcakes are just botoxed buns that lie about their age. Cupcakes make idiots happy. The day I make a cupcake is the day I do my face in with a brick.

ICE NOTHING. Icing is the enemy of everything. It’s a lie. People who eat icing only do it because it’s marginally more acceptable than sitting down and ploughing through a block of butter with a knife and fork. Oh, you’ve made it pink and covered it in glitter and stuck a tiny shoe in it? It’s still butter. You’re fooling nobody, you butter-eating pigfucker.

FUCK YOU. Yeah, I baked something. It’s the shape of a wet poo and it’s burnt on the top and raw in the middle and you’ll probably get stomach cramps and rectal bleeding if you ever try and eat it. Fuck you.

I get around all this by mainly baking bread. I bake bread because I like the smell of baking bread. Admittedly I could smell baking bread by getting up at 5:30 every morning and hanging out around the back of Sainsbury’s, but I don’t do that because I’m lazy and I’m pretty sure that the homeless people who hang out around the back of Sainsbury’s have knives.

I also bake bread because I’m a writer. Take this, for example. It only exists on a screen. You can’t hold it in your hands or smell it. It probably doesn’t even make you very happy. But bread is different. You spend hours on bread, working at it with your hands and creating this perfect, brown, tangible, glorious smelling thing that exists. Everyone likes bread. It takes love to bake bread. It’s like making a child. And then eating that child.

Finally, I bake bread because it’s just some bread that you bake and then put on a plate and then eat. Fuck you.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Look, I’m a woman. I’ve got a blog. I’m supposed to be able to bake. I’m one of the original Jackson Five; I should be a master baker. But the fact is I can’t bake. God knows I’ve tried. I don’t know what sort of alchemical genius you have to be to turn flour, eggs, sugar and butter into a delicious baked treat, all I know is that I’m not one. For instance, once I took a muffin recipe written for children, followed it to the fucking letter, and this happened:

When I took these out of the oven the entire kitchen fell silent. Then someone said, “you must tell people that these are special thick biscuits.”

I must be missing the baking gene.

Which is unfair because I like cakes. I love cupcakes - I spent Easter Sunday trapped in a hellish downward spiral where I produced batch after batch of substandard Easter cupcakes. Initially the cakes were burnt but the icing was incredible. In the next batch, the cakes were fluffy and moist but the icing was like baby vomit. The third batch was made of egg whites, baking powder and tears because THAT’S ALL THAT WAS LEFT IN THE KITCHEN. I spent most of Bank Holiday Monday washing icing sugar out of my hair, then on Tuesday I had to go to work.

Baking is a fucking gyp.

It’s so infuriating. Bastards like Lorraine Pascal make it look so easy, simpering about in pastels saying “dollop” and “smidgen” and somehow producing a tray of perfect, minuscule, intricate, rainbow-hued FUCKING MACARONS. If I tried doing that in MY kitchen I’d set fire to my elbow and fall into the bin. All my friends are supernaturally competent bakers, too. One of them can bake cupcakes, dispense life advice, and crack dick jokes, all the space of forty minutes. She can put flat-pack furniture together, as well. And she never gets period pains. It’s almost insurmountably intimidating.

I’ve tried to improve my baking skills through practice, but the problem is that baking creates abundance, and shit baking creates shit abundance. You can’t bake ONE terrible cupcake; you have to bake six or 12. You can’t bake a slice of awful pie. And nobody wants 24 burnt blueberry muffins (I know, I’ve asked. For the record, no one wants 42 of them, either).

So I’ve had to accept that I am a non-baker. Even though baking is symbolic of home, hearth and happiness. Being a good baker signifies to the world that you’re fertile, that you’ve mastered domesticity, that you’re a nurturer.

Being a bad baker says “I’ll probably put bad eggs in your kids, and I won’t give them enough butter. I’ll probably burn them then drop them on their heads, yell that they’ve ruined my life and kick them until they splatter against the wall,” which, to be fair, is probably accurate.
- Robyn Wilder 

LUV - So far, The Voice is a pretty terrible show. If you haven’t seen it, here’s what happens: a blandly competent singer clomps up on a stage and warbles, while Jessie J and an anonymous Irish man take turns to pull faces that make them look as if the deformed mutant puppy from The Fly II has sneezed a bucket of pukey shit right across their chins. This continues until everyone dies. The Voice, make no mistake, is fucking woeful. It’s almost a completely lost cause.

Almost.

Because Tom Jones is on The Voice.

Oh, Tom Jones. Glorious Tom Jones. Four hundred years old, made entirely of water-damaged plether and with a speaking voice that singlehandedly invented Skrillex, Tom Jones is the only reason to watch The Voice.

I love Tom Jones for many reasons - the day his hair suddenly turned from black to grey (I maintain that this happened because someone showed him a relatively old invention, like a CD or or a Soda Stream, and his body couldn’t handle the technology) or his exasperated “That’s unbelievable” after the rapping bit whenever he covers EMF to name but two - but I especially love him on The Voice.

We’re only two episodes in, and already the ingenious Tom Jones On The Voice formula has become blazingly apparent. This is how it works:

WHEN AN ACT IS SINGING - Only press your button when they make a noise that you could feasibly make yourself. So: DON’T press your button if they’re haunting and ethereal. But DO press your button if they sound like a buffalo having its testicles sandpapered inside a burning orphanage that’s being pushed down a flight of stairs.

WHEN NO ACT IS SINGING - Just spout off about your career to nobody in particular. Maybe say “I played guitar with Elvis Presley once, you know.” Or “Did I ever tell you about the time I sang a disco version of Sloop John B on a boat in just my pants?” Or “Once upon a time I interrupted an episode of This Is Tom Jones to flail around like I was being attacked by ALL THE WASPS.” Alternatively, if no anecdote comes to you immediately, just say the words “Frank Sinatra” out loud and hope that nobody notices.

Tom Jones has to win The Voice. I don’t mean an act coached by Tom Jones either - I mean actual Tom Jones. I want the final of The Voice to end with Tom Jones standing atop a pile of dead and unconscious singers, victoriously thrusting someone’s torn-off leg into the air and taking the audience’s appalled screams as acceptance of his ferocious might.

This is the way it must be. It’s the only recognition that Tom Jones deserves. Tom Jones is a king among men. I wish he was my dad or, more realistically, my great great great great grandfather. Or whatever.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Castigating a national idol like Tom Jones was never going to be easy. Even a national idol who, on occasion, clearly puts the hours in with a toothbrush, a magnifying mirror, and two boxes of Just For Men (one for his beard).

Even a national idol who - despite electing to celebrate reaching his fifties by shuffling into a pair of leather trousers, dancing like a swivel-eyed cow trying to escape from a girdle, and blarting out a song about exploding spaff - STILL still managed to capture the hearts of the general public.

That’s quite the feat.

Imagine some other national idol doing that. Imagine Princess Anne trussing herself up in fetish gear and honking out a cover of I Touch Myself by The Divinyls (if you’re having trouble imagining that, just imagine Christina Aguilera). Imagine Eamonn Holmes dip-dyeing himself mahogany, unbuttoning his shirt and saying “sex me slow, slow baby” straight to camera. You can’t, can you? Such a thing would be an abomination. And yet Tom Jones can roar his way distractedly through a version of I Bet That You Look Good on the Dance Floor looking slightly bewildered at the existence of Joss Stone, and you people - rather than seating him in a nice patch of sunlight and settling a blanket over his knees as you SHOULD - clasp him to your hearts, call him a hero, and generally encourage more of this nonsense.

And this is partly because a) he seems like a genuinely nice, if slightly dull, man, b) his 1960s Vegas shows were “a knicker-hurling frenzy of raw sex and good-time entertainment”, which HAVE to count for something apart from the long shadow of CHLAMYDIA, and c) when he trots out his regular Elvis anecdotes somehow it doesn’t seem as though he’s repeatedly hauling a sequinned cadaver onto a stage with a dwindling audience, even though he is.

But, no matter how nice he is or what sort of legacy he trails behind him, the REAL measure of a titan of Tom Jones’ magnitude is the quality of his tribute acts. So let us examine the cream of them:

“Sex Bomb”

“My Prayer”
 

“Pork Salad Annie”
 

“You Lay A Whole Lot Of Love On Me”
 

“Mama Told Me Not To Come”

ACTUALLY JOHN PRESCOTT*.

It’s official. Tom Jones is what John Prescott ASPIRES TO BE. That’s got to earn him a HAT, surely. SURELY.

*Not actually John Prescott.
- Robyn Wilder

LUV - Oh Krispy Kreme. You have ruined all other doughnuts for me. All of them. Sugared doughnuts. Jammy doughnuts. Even those Rolo doughnuts that have a perfect ring of caramel magically inserted in them and come in packs of four that you have to eat all at once, one after the other in quick succession, because you live alone and you never go outside and you’ve managed to convince yourself that they’ll somehow counteract your debilitating vitamin D deficiency. Even those, for crying out loud.

Before Krispy Kreme, my method of assessing doughnut satisfaction was simple. I’d take a bite of a doughnut and ask myself “Is this a good doughnut?”. But not any more. Krispy Kreme hasn’t so moved the goalposts as booted them right into orbit forever. Because now my method of assessing doughnut satisfaction has become much more complex.

Now I have to ask myself questions like “Is this so sugary that it’s thrown my tongue into crippling cramp-spasms?” and “Is this so sugary that it’s sent me temporarily blind?” and “If I set fire to this doughnut, would it produce enough energy to keep a medium-sized city running for an entire calendar month?” and “If I enter this into my calorie counter app, will my phone slap me in the face, vomit and then commit suicide?” and “If I eat more than one of these, will my body explode and cover everyone in a 50-foot radius with a mixture of spinal fluid and raspberry jam?”

If the answers to all of these are yes, I’m probably eating a Krispy Kreme. But if the answer to even one of these questions is no, the combination of shame and disappointment derived from my non-Krispy Kreme doughnut will drive me to my basement, where I’ll intravenously inject myself with a mixture of sugar and animal fat until the pain goes away.

Because there is nothing in this world as good as the sugary, synthetic, completely empty hit of a Krispy Kreme. The softness of it in your mouth. The ease with which your saliva can dissolve the glaze. The spurt of filling. The way you have to eat it out of sight of all other human beings so they won’t judge you. The fact that you can wash it down with a Krispy Kreme iced fruit drink that manages to be simultaneously sweeter and more calorific than the doughnut itself. The knowledge that you can quite easily work it off afterwards by walking all the way around the planet three times with a piano tied behind your back.

I love Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Just writing this has made me crave one to the extent that I’m eating the nearest available alternative. And that’s my fist. It’s nowhere near as good as a Krispy Kreme doughnut. Krispy Kreme doughnuts don’t have bones in them. I hate my stupid body.
- Stuart Heritage

HAT - Oh Krispy Kreme, please fuck off. You have sucked all the joy out of the doughnut experience. Everybody KNOWS that a decent doughnut should be fat and doughy and slightly squashed. And dusted with sugar, not ossified by the stuff. And everyone KNOWS that you should only fill doughnuts with:

1. Strawberry jam, OR
2. Raspberry jam, OR
3. Custard, OR
4. Proper squirty cream, OR
5. Nothing.

Because - as everyone KNOWS - with every bite into a doughnut you should risk lancing a jet of red, yellow or white gloop down a granny’s back in a tea room. Yeah. It’s called Doughnut Spurt Roulette, Krispy Kreme - it’s patriotic. And you’ve robbed us of that, you treasonous monster.

Also, your doughnut fillings are some bullshit - what the fuck is “kreme”, please, and why does it taste like fire extinguishing foam? Why does your custard filling look as though it’s seeped out of a wound? Why does every single part of ANY Krispy Kreme doughnut - regardless of whether it’s a Cookies and Kreme or Chocolate Dreamcake - taste like the sugar crumbs at the bottom of a bag of fossilised Cornish tourist fudge?

And this isn’t anti-American invective. As you may not know or care, I grew up in the USA as well as the UK. So I LIKE to smear great splodges of strawberry jam through loose, gloopy piles of peanut butter on processed white bread, I LIKE grape flavour products (and I REJOICE in the fact that they resemble NO GRAPE MAN HAS EVER TASTED), I’ve MADE my peace with corn syrup, and I LOVE American food.

However, in the transatlantic doughnut wars, Britain wins by a full head-and-neck, because it UNDERSTANDS the doughnut mentality.

And the doughnut mentality is NOT going to some glossy clinical-looking shop in something called a Galleria and being encouraged by jaunty sales assistants to buy twelve doughnuts as a “treat” for the “girls” in the office, who will all insist on cutting the doughnuts down the middle in a pathetic attempt at insulin mitigation.

The doughnut mentality is a) skulking shamefully into Gregg’s, b) staring at your shoes as the assistant drops multiple doughnuts and palpable scathing into a paper bag c) sitting hunched over on a park bench outside Curry’s, d) stuffing a doughnut into your mouth, then a doughnut and chasing that with another three doughnuts, e) raining jam droplets and sugar onto your knees, swooning and going “ungh”. Like a junkie.

AND THAT IS WHY, lady chairing this meeting, I DO NOT APPROVE OF THE HALF A FUCKING KRISPY KREME you’re proferring on a paper plate in return for my being here. Obviously I’ll eat it. But my point still stands. Is that other half going begging, then?
- Robyn Wilder