Monday 15th December – Business Plan

There are certain conversations you never really expect to have early in life, when all that matters to you is whether your fringe is correctly aligned and whether your trainers are laced in the appropriate style of the day. And whether any girls / boys anywhere, under any circumstances, might fancy you, and consider holding your hand as you sip snakebite and black in some freezing beer garden.

Idly chatting with another man about what route I took to arrive at a certain destination is such a conversation. But I have done it. Excruciatingly impersonal football-related banter with strangers. I have done it. Chat about ones favourite supermarket is another. I have done it.

Obviously this isn’t the first time I’ve had this chat. And, despite the apparent mundanity of chatting about where you buy your veggies, it appears, in fact, to be an area that people care passionately about. Like your car and your clothes, it seems that where you do you’re your grocery shopping is profoundly linked to many people’s image of themselves. Are you a high-falutin’, upscale, Waitrose type? Or are you more at home searching through the piles of Thor lager in Netto, looking for a dented tin you can haggle for a discount on?

Given the obvious snob-value of the Waitrose-style supermarkets, and the shameful slob-value of the Nettos and Sommerfields of the world, I have come up with a business plan. I need to gather a large amount of capital to buy an old premises and fix it up in the grandest possible manner, so that it makes Harrods food hall look like a filthy Wolverhampton ghetto.

People will be able to flounce into this super-fancy supermarket with their heads held high. However, what the rest of the world will not know is that, amongst the gold-plated trolleys and fur-trimmed staff tabards, only one product will be on sale. The shelves will be stacked high with hundreds of 10-kilo bags of what I call Prole Chow. The chow consists of small pellets that, when added to water, dissolve into a nutritious, light-brown mulch, packed with enough goodness to ward off even the most potent slum-virus.

Thus, the huddled masses get to eat semi-healthily, and yet retain their dignity. I become rich and fat, and can titter at their plight from a large, high-backed leather chair, surrounded by hundreds of CCTV monitors.

Everyone wins.

I will need financial backing and scientific support to develop the chow. Contact me.