Paul Foot: The Dough NOT Saga!
Last week I noticed this item in Sainsbury’s supermarket claiming to be a doughnut but looking nothing like my understood notion of what a doughnut is. What’s more, I could see through the window in the box that they were oozing with whipped cream. So I took a footograph and said this on my Facebonk page:
“I’m not happy with this Sainsbury’s item brazenly calling itself a doughnut when it is clearly pushing boundaries. It doesn’t even cite the abundance of frigging cream I can see through the box window! A split doughnut? Perhaps. Or an open doughnut? Or a doughnut éclair? It needs an adjective, if not its own name all together. Sainsbury’s need to speak up about this shadowy behaviour immediately!”
The Facebonk status very quickly accumulated “Likes” and one of my connoisseurs Sophie, depicted in a dashing mortar cap, named this crisis “DoughNOT”…
Meanwhile, on Twittarse, I raised the alarm and to my surprise received a response from a man called Neil who works on social media for Sainsbury’s 24 hour help line saying “That’s outrageous! I’ll pass your feedback on to the relevant department. Do you have any better names for them? Neil”
We had a little think here in The Guild about what we could call these DoughNOTS. Someone suggested “Creamy Fingers” others suggested “Jam Slippers”, but I invented my own term “Creamy Crevasse” – pronounced “Cr’Vass”…
Neil at Sainsbury’s liked this suggestion, and I began to admire his hands-on service. Here we were in the middle of a nomenclature crisis, and he’d swooped in to save the day. I let myself get a little carried away, and wrote the following about Neil’s social media powers – “Neil from Sainsbury’s can casually broadcast to 377,000 people (the amount of people who follow Sainsbury’s on Twittarse as of last week). He’s the BIG DOG (a phrase I heard watching telly on an aeroplane). I bet his primary school teachers didn’t see THAT coming. (I couldn’t be sure how much Neil had furthered his education, but I took a guess and assumed he probably did go to primary school). And then Neil responded with the following…
Of course any hopes I may have been harbouring that Neil would become a lover were now dashed. He’d used the word “brother” to me, which I chose to interpret as “BACK OFF HOMOSAXUAL!!!”. Homophobia on a very very low level, and in a nice way that I am totally chillaxed with.
Meanwhile on Facebonk, the situation had worsened. Connoisseur Nicky had found more doughNOTS, this time in Morrison’s! So flustered was Nicky (sporting some fetching black nail varnish) that she didn’t even have time to rotate her footograph by 90 degrees clockwise before pressing send…
Conversations in The Guild were spiralling OUT OF CONTROL by this point, with one gent screaming that they were called jam and cream fingers, Australian connoisseurs insisting that they were called LONG JOHNS, Connoisseur Paul Healy loudly reflecting on how doughnuts used to look like this, while Connoisseur Jools confirming in deafening falsetto that they were indeed called Cream Eclairs, as Connoisseur Mick ranted on and on about how they were Cream Doughnuts as once sold in hi olds school tuck shop… it was ABSOLUTE MAYHEM BAYBAYYYY!!!!
Meanwhile Neil from Sainsbury’s social media dispatch team had moved onto more pressing matters about someone who’d got their breast stuck in a hand-dryer at a store near Woking.
So, the Paul Foot Dough NOT Saga continues….
Which British supermarket will be the first to change the title on their packaging of these alien products that CANNOT simply be referred to as doughnuts when there are very different items on sale under the same roof with exactly the same name – and more importantly – match our understanding of what a doughnut is.
Well this Pflog post is 633 words already, so I think I’ll sign off now, into another room.
PF xxx