Filed under: family, food, humour, jokes, life, Rants, Scotland, stories | Tags: anchovy fillets, baxters, complaint, food, rant, salmonella
I’ve been away. In Perthshire. On holiday. Hence the neglect to my blog.
But I’m back and I’m gonna start with a rant.
The letter below, that I wrote to Baxters, should be self explanatory…
The Managing Director
Baxters Food Group
(Retail Division)
Fochabers
Moray
IV32 7LD
Dear Sir/Madam
I enclose a package of what your delicatessen in the Baxters Food Store in Blackford laughably describes as edible.
Were I in need of a quantity of rubber fish (perhaps to use as a prop in a Pantomime or even, more grandly, a movie) I’d have found the £2.70 I spent in Blackford a very worthwhile and economic investment. After all, to fashion such life-like facsimiles of the common or garden Anchovy fillet (Engraulis encrasicolus) would be no mean feat for such a price (no doubt the Chinese would have to be enlisted for their outstanding skills in mass producing machine-tooled ephemera).
Were I in need of a full colonic cleansing treatment I may have eschewed the four market leaders shown below and opted instead to actually consume these anchovyesque ‘things’ that you sold me.
As it happens my suspicions, which were aroused at point of sale, that this produce would be unfit for human consumption were sadly proven to be justified. They were raised upon observing your super-inefficient sales lady dousing the aforementioned Anchovy-like, gut churning, rubbery specimens in the ancient oil in which they lay, in a vain effort to breathe elasticity into their tired and dehydrated bodies.
Because, on opening the packing a few hours later her elaborate deception unravelled quicker than you can say ‘Salmonella’.
To say these anchovies were past their best would be an understatement of gargantuan proportions. These anchovies are so ‘past their best’ that I suspect they may have been caught by a trawler thrashing around in the wake of the Titanic. I may even go further than that and suggest they are the discovered remains of an orgiastic party held by Nefertiti.
Sir; because I have enclosed these vile beasts you will be able to see for yourself what these monsters of the deep could have done to me and my young family before you decide how best to unbesmirch the previously pristine reputation of the Baxters Food Group.
Yours faithfully
Mark Gorman
UPDATE
Yesterday I received a very straightforward letter in response to my own, bereft of humour, enclosing a £10 voucher and an apology. Ok, fair enough, they took it on the chin, but I’d have liked a bit of repartee (and a hamper).
