London Adventures #4 - Pret Is A Cult

London, the place where everyone is; more beautiful, more stressed, more healthy and more addicted to tobacco than me.

I'm not kidding, there is bloody tobacco everywhere—in the bars, out the bars, in the office, on the 'award winning' roof garden and even outside the children's primary school. The only thing I see in peoples hands more than tobacco are faded red, thick paper bags with the slogan "Pret a Manger".
I see it everywhere, but none more that in the hands of employees strutting in and out of the offices of The Financial Times, thus bringing me to the only logical conclusion. Pret a Manger is some cryptic slogan as adopted by a 'wholefood', upper class cult.

I fear my safety is at risk just posting this but people of the world need to be aware of this. All the cult members seem to have crease-less suits and walk in an almost 'day dream' like sense of self-worth; I fear they may have been capitalistically brainwashed and find each day a gruesome dredge until they can crawl out onto the high street at 1pm to get their fix of £8 sandwiches and faux-french chalkboards.

Anyway, moving swiftly on—today I did not get lost! At last there is hope! I found myself at the office, on time and not totally embarrassed. The majority of the working day went off without a hitch, and because of todays geographic successes, I felt adventurous, so I thought I'd go have a browse of the Borough market in my lunch hour; and what did I stumble upon? (I hear you ask)

Rough translation "City of Vin"

As you'll clearly see from the photo, just off Borough Market is a modern, well established, underground city named after me. I knew it must exist somewhere, but central London wouldn't of been my first guess. So after taking a moment to calm down from my initial shock, I marched towards the door, slammed them open, arms in the air and exclaimed "No worries my citizens, your lord and saviour has returned!". The initial look of shock on their faces made me feel like the god-like figure they must have portrayed me as; until I saw bottle after bottle of expensive wine and the disgusted look on the face of the bar attendant—I realised it was not my promised land but instead a now mildly disrupted wine wholesaler.

Once again, moving on. I finished up the day by searching through the NME archive and doing little bits of editorial which was really rather fun indeed. So a pretty good day really.

p.s. I made most that crap up—but you couldn't tell.