Its the end of an era. Life will never be the same again. A modern day tragedy.

McDonalds in Hampstead is closing.

Well who gives a shit? That’s what they serve; shit. Killer shit. Anyone who saw ‘Supersize Me’ knows that McDonalds peddle death to the masses. A quarter pounder with cheese weighs… er… well, about a quarter of a pound. But contains half a pound of fat. Normal laws of physics are suspended with that burger chain’s ability to sell fat, salt and sugar. They have produced a nation of fat bastards. In fact several nations. Heart attacks in waiting.

Yet it  tastes so good.

I stopped eating McDonalds years ago after the first ‘big cholesterol scare’. Well, it scared Mel, didn’t bother me much but I immediately stopped my serious McDonalds habit which was, at 3 or 4 visits a week, probably a bit excessive. Cholesterol came down, a bit, and all is well once more.

But Hampstead and McDonalds was never a good fit. Hampstead has serious pretentions and is filled with tofu-eating, champagne-socialist ‘liberals’, who are also full of shit. But a different kind of shit to that sold with fries. In paper containers which decimate rainforests and create endless litter. Such was the resistance to the store opening that it took 12 years of court battles before the first burger was ever sold there. The purchaser was pelted with organic tomatoes, free-range eggs and alphalpha sprouts.

I love hamburgers. I love food generally. But particularly messy food you eat with your hands. And although Maccy Ds do not produce the finest specimen of the genre, they do produce a pretty good facsimile that is cheap and available everywhere. Comforting at times even, when you emerge from a rainforest in deepest darkest Ecuador a thousand miles from civilisation to be greeted with those golden arches. So that immediately after your indignation about the ruination of the world’s natural beauty by corporate greed shitheads, you can wrap yourself round a Big Mac and enjoy its universal consistency.

But there’s a problem with the closure of McDonalds Hampstead. They sell ice cream. Really fantastic ice cream. Dirt cheap too. So rather than buy low-fat fro-yo type uber-vegan low-cal vegi-un-cream frozen desert, next door for just £14.65 a scoop, when Mel & I walk on  a summer’s day (remember summer?) over the heath into Hampstead village, that’s where we head. That in fact is our ‘carrot’, dangling in front of our sun-baked, sweaty foreheads as we trek. Ice cream. From Maccy D. And now its gone.

Fucking Hampstead tarts

 

Happy thursday, eat well

 

A xxxx