Bagels. Bagels, eh? Right. Anybody wanna tell me what bagels is all about? Huh? Last week I saw Annabel Croft in a South London Waitrose and she was daintily holding a bag of bagels between her thumb and middle finger and delicately dropping it onto the pile of healthy options in her cart. Once again, all the bagel questions I always wanted to ask came to the surface, beginning with “What’s actually the point of a buying an oily, gooey, un-sliceable chunk of internally stale cack with twenty per cent missing from the centre?”

If you went down the local bakery and asked for half a dozen cobs and the baker then slapped them onto the counter and then pulled out a piece of scaffold piping, chonked all the middles out and charged you the same price, his missus would have him sectioned… after you’d both chinned the nutter first, of course!

So, you’ve got the things home and you’ve managed to slice one in half without too much of it all over the worktop; how do you butter it? Spin and swipe at the same time? Or do you put it on a circular table and walk around it? Twice for the other half? Or one swoop and hope for the best, so that the bit that you don’t see falling into the hole doesn’t get all over yer fingers when it warms up later.

The next dilemma is filling. Let’s say you want a slice of nice ham or beef. What do you do? One normal slice which fills in the hole when you put it back together, in which case, what’s the point of the hole in the first place? When you eat the middle bit of meat, which has no resistance from the compacted bread, it pulls a big buttery shred out, which slops down onto yer chin and makes you look a slob twat in company. Or do you make a prat of yerself chopping and shaping the meat to fit around in a circle?
What about when I fancy a bit of cheese and onion? ‘Hello, Mr Greengrocer! An onion the size of a medium volleyball please, so I can sit and peel layers upon layers away until it’s the same circumference as me bagel, then chop it in half and hope I poke the right size out the middle, so I don’t have to come back for another! Cheese? See above! Fried egg? Don’t even think about it, unless it’s for a prank. Salad? Go and do a jigsaw instead. Toast it? Doesn’t retain moisture, so it’s like eating polystyrene.

So what can you do with the useless fucking things? Simple… just upgrade to pretzels instead, accompanied by a crate of Erdinger Weissbier. Solid crust, which keeps the inside soft enough to soak up the litres and it’s got crafty little granules of salt on the glaze, in case yer sodium levels drop on the way back to the Weissbier shop. Okay, technically more holes, but you don’t have to fart about with fillings, these are scoff as seen. I recommend one large pretzel per three litres of beer. For all you hoodlums who’ve yet to sample the esoteric delights of this brand of beer, get yersens along to the ‘Fade/Hard to find Café’ halfway up Mansfield Rd. It’s the only place for a hundred and thirty miles which has it on tap and make sure you get a slice of lemon or orange in the top. Sorry… did I somehow manage to drag the conversation round to beer again?

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