Great North West pasty survey

"The ever-popular sausage roll continues to be one of our best selling products"

Greggs the Bakers do a roaring trade in pastry-based, high-fat luncheon savouries. Every day, you can go for a walk into your local North West town's shopping area and you'll see masses of people chomping something hot and tasty from a Greggs bag.

For the past year or so, I've been conducting the Great North West Pasty Survey in which I measure the proportion of shopping precinct dwellers who have their faces shoved into a Greggs bag. I correlate this with the proportion of folk strolling along using walking aids, or causing mayhem on one of those trecherous motorised scooter things, i.e. incapacity benefits spongers. Let's just say, the correlation is very high; no matter whether it's my local shopping precinct here, or the fabulous Halton Lea Shopping City, they eat these things by the truck load. Of course, people who buy their pies and pastries from Hampson's ("so fresh we're famous"), Greenhalgh's and Martin's aren't as common and they tend to wait to get home before stuffing their faces. And I haven't forgotten the dodgy glazed icing coating on Greggs' ring doughnuts!

My shopping precinct has no less than FOUR bakeries. I am truly blessed by God's good grace.

The local Conservative Party candidate was at the precinct, pretending to canvass support while secretly counting the number of work-shy dolescum so she could report them at Shop Them. At least I hope that's what she was doing.

I was going to walk to the shops this afternoon, but as I approached the front gate, I heard the jingle jangle of an excited Max racing through the bushes after me. Despite a number of attempts to get him in the house, so as he wouldn't follow me onto the busy main road, he insisted on being the tit that he is so I ended up driving. That cat really does get me into trouble; it's no wonder the gangs of local youths take the piss out of me.

It's all Rover! Now, it's pretty devastating for the ex-workforce of Rover, who have all lost their jobs this week. It's bad too for the people employed by other industries that supply the car manufacturers. And it's not much fun for the Rover dealerships around the country. I honestly sympathise with all of them. However, the most severely affected will be us poor bastard motorists! Up until now, the presence of a Rover has been a first class indicator that the driver is a complete cock, how will we recognise these people once all the Rovers are off the roads? My guess is they'll transfer to Citroen C5s and Toyota Avensises (Avenses?), but there's no way of knowing for sure. I'm bloody scared, I can tell you. I suppose one way is to look out for people who are driving as if they're towing a caravan - did you know that the Rover 75 has a "caravan button" to boost power when towing?