Robert McNeil: 'I love a latte, the warm milk appeals to the infant in me'

Published on Monday 27 July 2009 20:39

CAPITALIST plans to kill us all continue apace. Now it emerges, as we say exclusively in the media, that the amount of calories in a cuppa from those trendy coffee places exceeds that in a fish supper coated in curry sauce.

As you can imagine, I'm rarely in such places, imagining them to be full of the Shorts People, cyclists and others with no objective sense of their own shamefulness.

However, on many weekends, I do visit a quiet one hidden upstairs in a shop selling greetings cards and other rubbish. The only other guests tend to be fat shoppers and unfashionable families looking for lavatories.

I enjoy a latte. The warm milk appeals to the infant in me. But I may have to rethink my proclivities, if new shock reports in major news outlets are to be believed. For, yea, it seems some of these drinks contain a quarter of a burd's daily calorie allowance.

Last time I looked I wasn't a burd but, all the same, this revelation comes into the category often described as "bombshell". If you read the small print, the calories tend surprisingly to be in those fancy mochas and the like that come with a massive dod of whipped cream floating on the surface.

The reports were typically confusing, with the bombshell opening paragraphs fingering iced coffee for fatness but, further down, saying these only had three calories, which equates to a small crumb from a steak pie. But some other iced coffees apparently are more or less lethal. Perhaps it's all the fat in the ice. I will waddle to my grave not understanding the whole calories thang.

Complex computers attached to the Heath-Robinson equipment at my gymnasium tell me I've shed 250 calories, but the scales never register any reduction in weight. It's all codswallop, if you ask me. Codswallop, that's another one: full of calories.

How do you get iced coffee anyway? I always asked fancied one, as hot drinks enflame my already scarlet coupon. But every time I've requested one, the unhappy young person behind the counter has looked at me as if I were from ooter space. That I am from ooter space is neither here nor there. Perhaps I wasn't employing the correct terminology: a full-fat freezio, or some such, done over-easy. But the question remains: why do the capitalists hate us so? If they're not adding sugar to oven chips (as they do at Markies), they're disguising their poisons with weird words such as fructose, or saying "contains no sugar", while filling their products with dodgy sweeteners. You must be on your guard the whole time.

Meanwhile, leading Teutonic cheapmeisters Lidl have begun an advertising campaign which notes that many citizens shop there secretly. I've met such citizens and they always try to persuade me that, because the store is German, the stuff must somehow be good. This simply does not follow. I have many German friends and have no hesitation in describing them as utterly evil.

Mind you, John Lewis is morally good (unless it still invites its staff to go shooting), but Waitrose is wicked. Maybe it's the areas they're in, but there's always something of an atmosphere, and you must try not to faint when you get your bill at the checkout.

All of these places should be nationalised, so that they become like the Co-op, dowdy but ethical, unimaginative and unenterprising, but still somehow "ours".

Alex shows he's a trews Scot

IT IS with a heavy heart that I must address you today on the subject of Alex Salmond's trousers. As you'll have gathered from urgent news reports, the First Minister chose to wear tartan trews to the forward-looking Clan Gathering held in Surrey-on-Forth at the weekend.

I've commented comprehensively and authoritatively on these horrible habiliments before. Tartan trews crush the soul. They offend against nature and, if God were still around, would provoke him into one of his rages, involving many deaths, yea, and pestilences also, ken?

To add insult to injury, His Eckness was compared unfavourably to Prince Charles, the leader of England. Prince Charles looks good in a kilt, and it's weel kent that he likes to feel a breeze around his Cairngorms. Informed speculation suggests the Prince of Wales even votes Plaid Cymru, such is his love of tartan. But to have the man who would lead Scotia to normal nationhood out-plaid by this amiable Anglo-German crypto-monarch is hard to bear.

I cannot think why Eck eschews the kilt. Inaccurate reports describe our First Minister as "fat". Let us be clear here, as they say in politics when porkies are imminent: the First Minister is not slim. But he's not the full bloater, as seen in Asda or on the Stranraer-to-Belfast ferry. He is, shall we say, robustly built. Portly might even be the mot juste. As such, he ought to look good in a kilt, which is often worn to great effect by stocky individuals. Even bald people, forbidden to wear the kilt until the Baldies Equality Act of 1956, can look good in a kilt.

Eck, who is himself showing signs of baldness – thus making it possible that he'll be ineligible to lead the country after the next election – could have disguised the blob bulging over his waistband if he'd worn the waistcoat and sporran of the full kiltie rig-out.

If Mr Salmond forces the people of Scotia to be free, he will go down in history as a great tyrant. His image will endure for centuries and, in the name of decency, he cannot be depicted for posterity with his portly posterior jammed into such lamentable breeks.