Update at https://www.davidlandoncole.com/2017/07/yorkshire-pork-on-virgin-trains/
This post originally appeared on my Tumblr.
“Every day, the New York Times carries a motto in a box on its front page. “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” it says. It’s been saying it for decades, day in and day out. I imagine most readers of the canonical sheet have long ceased to notice this bannered and flaunted symbol of its mental furniture. I myself check every day to make sure that the bright, smug, pompous, idiotic claim is still there. Then I check to make sure that it still irritates me. If I can still exclaim, under my breath, why do they insult me and what do they take me for and what the hell is it supposed to mean unless it’s as obviously complacent and conceited and censorious as it seems to be, then at least I know I still have a pulse. You may wish to choose a more rigorous mental workout but I credit this daily infusion of annoyance with extending my lifespan.”
Christopher Hitchens often remarked on the bothersome masthead of the New York Times. I begin to understand how he felt when I look at the entirely more banal menu on Virgin Trains East Coast.
By way of preface, if you haven’t already been bored to tears, I travel weekly from Huntingdonshire to York. I can book well in advance, so it’s often actually cheaper to travel first class. Hence, I have the free food and drink, and so read the menu. Allow me, gentle reader, to give you a flavour:
Breakfast
Early risers, we salute you!
Start your morning just right, after all it is the most important meal of the day.
Fuck off. Just fuck off. When I am reading this, it’s about half past six in the morning and I have been up for an hour. I want coffee, not your upbeat fuckwittery. However, that is just the introit. I am then invited to order “one of our brilliant breakfast selections”:
Our truly great British breakfast…
I cannot be bothered to finish the entry. No matter how hard you try, the breakfast will have been prepared in a travelling kitchen. You cannot prepare a truly great anything in a galley moving in excess of one hundred miles per hour. This is compounded by the offering of “rare breed pork sausage”. So rare, it would seem, that they don’t know what breed of pig went into it. Gloucester Old Spot and British Saddleback may both be rare breeds, but they are not the same fucking thing. Pretending that they are the same thing is, frankly, an insult to the farmers who bust their guts looking after rare breeds.
I will save you from the porridge – apparently, “wonderfully warming” – and the “heavenly” smoked salmon. Put the thesaurus down.
The next entry that particularly offends me (there have been many minor offences in the meantime) is in the all-day section. I am offered a
“[t]ruly continental platter consisting of prosciutto, salami, Mozzarella, stuffed olives and sundried tomatoes served with mixed leaf salad and a bread roll”.
Not synthetically continental, but truly continental. Presumably, we have sufficient contempt for Virgin Trains East Coast that their mere assertion of continental origin is insufficient; they must assure us that they really fucking mean it. Why is mozzarella capitalised, but not prosciutto? I can see the case for neither or both, but not just one. How much was a Wykehamist paid to produce this codswollop?
I am later offered lemon and rosemary cake, which, I presume on the authority of Virgin Trains, is ‘luscious’, and not just alliterative. The Wensleydale is ‘cracking’, presumably latae sententiate.
While it is a minor thing, I object to this casual abuse of the English language. If it’s a fry-up, say it’s a fry-up. Stop beating the English language to make it sound like something greater, particularly when every-one knows that it’s a fucking fry-up. It’s a lump of cheese and, given its likely treatment and serving, is not wonderful.
It’s worth pointing out that, despite being a prematurely middle-aged wearer of corduroy, I am one of the least fuddy-duddy passengers in this compartment. I am not sure who they think the audience is, but neither the language nor the red and charcoal branding is going to convince anyone that you are anything other than a train company.
What particularly bothers me is that Virgin are in the process of refurbishing their trains. I suspect they have spent a considerable amount of money on changing the covering of the seats that were more than adequate, but they seem to have forgotten to do useful things like put it plug sockets, or handles on the inside of carriage doors, or toilets that reliably flush.
A hearty barley risotto? Get in the fucking sea.