mostly david ephgrave

Tonight, I experienced a Pizza Hut Ice Cream Factory for the first time. To be honest, Factory is a bit of a misnomer, when it's just a small lever attached to a hole-in-the-wall. It’s akin to drawing ice cream out at a cash machine, if ATMs did such a thing. My wife went first, to show me how it was done, which turned my inexperience to fear. I wasn’t prepared for the Generation Game atmosphere to the whole thing, nor for the fact the Ice Cream ‘Factory’ has been calibrated for the right-handed dessert eater, which left me with the wrong hand doing the swirly swirly motion to catch the Mr Whippy-style ice-cream as it curled out into the bowl. If you’d asked me before tonight, I would never have anticipated a word of my previous sentence, but there you have it; what happens in Pizza Hut changes lives. The way the Factory was embedded into the wall made me feel suspicious; what goes on on the other side?: Is there a genetically-modified ...

Of all the junk mail that’s been pushed through my door, one item stands head and shoulders above the rest: my laminated menu from Pizza Hot. Not Pizza Hut. Pizza Hot . A subtle but important difference. It’s not the substituted vowel that amuses me. It’s the plastic coating. The sense of permanence is unflinching. They obviously don't think you’ll ever throw it out. That's pretty optimistic.   It also shows commitment. Let’s assume the menu was delivered to every house in Hitchin. That’s 33,352 people. Even after divvying them out to approximately three per household, that’s still 11,117 properties. The mathematics may be crude, but my point still stands. That’s not taking into account the neighbouring towns of Stevenage and Letchworth, who also fall into the Pizza Hot catchment. They have an accumulated population of 117,600. That’s a heck of a lot of laminate. They obviously weren't afraid to flash their cash. But...