Pret a Mangled (featuring Attack Of The Cute Ickle Copy)

I feel about as creative as a breeze block.

‘Block’ being the operative word. I need to write for projects both corporate and personal, but the page is unforgivingly blank.

Wind and rain are crashing against the windows. Inspiration has left the building.

Nothing is working. 

It's odd, because over the past couple of months, ideas just flowed. New people, new opportunities, shoots, we've felt a surge of energy through the festive season.

But this morning the weather sucks, the news is rubbish, I’m drowning in admin, and my nephew gloats from Sydney about the surf and the 35 degree days at the beach. Grrrrr. Thanks, Lachlan. G’day mate. Bonzer. 

I feel like having a rant, a real one. We need to look at The Dark Side. 

I brave the rain and take my Vaio round the corner to Pret, seeking coffee and salvation.

I want to write about something. Anything. Let's write about here, this place. So here goes:

......“Pret a Manger. Pret. If ever one brand defined the Smugness of Now, it’s the omnipresent Pret. A sign outside this morning says : ‘Diets are sad. Instead, enjoy proper food, three times a day. Not too much, not too little.' 

Now c’mon guys. Your ‘All Day Breakfast’ sandwich boasts 560 calories, 49g of carbs and a stunning 27.5g of fat. 'Classic Super Club'? That weighs in with a meagre 548 calories, 38g of carbs (enough to make Dr Atkins rotate in his grave - presumably he's thin enough to do so) and a love-handle inducing 31.5g of fat. 

Mango Smoothies have 31g of carbs per bottle. Mango overboard, I'd say.

If you ate three All Day Breakfast sarnies a day, washed down with the aforementioned Smoothie, you’d make Mr Blobby look like Keira Knightley.

Plus all the sandwiches are so fussy. Can’t they just do Ham and Cheese? No, it always has to be things like Organic Quail’s Egg with Essence of Wild Salmon and Olives Picked At Dawn by Peruvian Goatherdsmen and Drizzled with The Sweat of Finnish Elk. And Random Capitalisation. 

It’s like having someone else’s taste literally rammed down your throat. And they put about 3 whole lettuces in each sandwich. Don’t you know that some of us don’t like having forests of green bits in their teeth – they can seriously damage your sex life!

Pret takes hypocrisy to Olympian heights. They’re owned 40% by Macdonald’s for Crissake! MacDo's, that temple of health and low-fat nutrition.

Plus there’s that tone of voice……it’s so PATRONISING.

‘Diets are sad’. Ugh. They’re not sad when you lose thirty pounds, feel like a God/Goddess, and start getting hit on by the opposite sex. (Or the same sex, if that’s your calling).

And the labelling is so cutesy and cringe-making. Pret are suffering from a terminal Attack Of The Cute Ickle Copy. A plastic bag is labelled ‘A little bag of nuts, fruits and seeds.’ Well thanks guys, I can see what it freakin’ is because it’s little and it’s transparent and it’s got nuts, fruits and seeds in it.

Innocent, the juice company, really started the craze for cute ickle copy. When they opened for business, I always thought it wonderfully paradoxical that they came across all natural and cute and childlike and, well, innocent, when actually they made the stuff at an industrial estate off the darkest part of Goldhawk Road where you need an AK-47 stuffed up your overcoat to stand any chance of survival.

Across the land, copywriters are now drowning in a vast vat of gooey tweeness.

My gym has caught the same disease. A broken StairMaster this morning bears a circular – and expensively produced – sign which says "I’m a little under the weather today. But I’ll be back on my feet very soon.”

Now I don’t know about you, and I can see it’s quite engaging to endow machines with human qualities (my cars have always had names) – but I haven’t really found StairMasters to be great conversationalists. You wouldn’t really want to go for a cheeky beer with one. So wouldn’t a piece of card with ‘Out of Order’ have done the trick pretty well?

But they label everything at my gym. The men’s changing room bizarrely tells you that this is a ‘Girl-Free Zone’ as you enter. Well I should hope so, matey.

The lifts even have a little sign above each one that says ‘Lift’. Well what else are they? If you see sliding metallic doors which have up/down buttons to one side, they do tend to be devices for moving between floors!”

………And so my rant went on, and got more and more angry, certainly beyond what I’d post on a public blog. Most of it, I really don’t mean. It was to be The Post That Never Was. Except having reviewed it 48 hours later, I thought I’d share it with you.

Because however forced, however dark, I'm writing again. Job done. Now I can move onto the real work. Sometimes you need to get angry to get creative.

(PS: I'm a total hypocrite. I drop about a tenner a day in Great Portland Street Pret. The line moves quickly, the latte's great, and I love their drink Yoga Detox Bunny - despite the cute  ickle copy.)