KEN TOWL set off on a mission to trial the new bakery chain in town and got much more than he bargained for
Coffee, croissant and a row: you can get more than you bargained for in Janes in Addiscombe
“I’d have to have a ball gag in my mouth but I wouldn’t say no,” said the ex-warehouseman to the manageress.
It was only later that it occurred to me that, ball gag in mouth, anyone would be hard-pressed to say anything. At the time, breakfast time, I had popped into Janes Pantry in Addiscombe to try their coffee and their croissant, and I just thought it was a slightly outré bit of workplace banter, the sort that you don’t usually enter into within the earshot of customers.
It shattered my illusion.
I had pictured Janes Pantry, just like the Coughlans chain they have replaced, as decidedly bourgeois, somewhere in the pastry world between the proudly proletarian Greggs and the archly aristocratic Gails. I hadn’t imagined it to be anything like the front room of a Soho sex parlour, so when ball gag man asked me what I would like, I had to suppress my imagination as it ran through a smorgasbord of potential services that he might be offering.
“A coffee and a croissant,” I said, hoping to impose some degree of middle-class decorum. The flat white was £3.85 and the croissant £2.50, a total of £6.35 for my continental breakfast in Janes. I can’t complain. The coffee was good; the croissant was fresh. In Gails, the same combination would have cost me £4.40 plus £3.55, a total of £7.95; in Greggs, £2.70 plus £1.45, a total of £4.15.
I had been in Janes a couple of days earlier. A friend had offered a “cheap date”. She had the “Too good to go” app on her phone. It connects potential customers looking for a bargain to food outlets looking to offload unsold perishables at the end of the working day. It offers huge discounts from retailers looking to get at least something for their goods rather than throw them away.
Thus, for a total of £3.79, we took away two sausage rolls (normally £3.50 each in Janes), a cauliflower cheese pie (£4.50), a steak and kidney pie (£5.50), two scones (£1.80 each) as well as a mini sourdough baguette and a wholemeal loaf.
Obviously, it was something of a bargain for £3.79, but I am not sure I’d want a meal like that every day. To be clear, each of the items were on a spectrum from edible (the scones) to very nice indeed (the steak and kidney). The pastry was flaky and enjoyable to eat. But then it is in Greggs, too, so if you can stand the harsh yellow and blue primary colours of Greggs, and you don’t mind mixing with hoi polloi, you can save a lot of money there. You might prefer, however to expend a little more to sit in the soft sage colouring scheme of Janes and feel just a little bit more sophisticated.
For me, the illusion was shattered as soon as I heard the ball gag reference, and it was about to get worse. I was the only customer for a while, which allowed me to eavesdrop on more workplace indiscretions.
Until in walked a loud man, one of those types who like to make their presence felt. He liked Biscoff buns – I can attest to that because he bought two – and he wanted to engage in conversation. His technique was to ask questions designed to demand the answers that he wanted, to get affirmation for his views. He was not going to be satisfied with a couple of £3.50 buns.
At first, it was all quite innocuous – he even appeared to be doing my job for me, and I was silently grateful for his brusque, overbearing manner.
“How is it going? What’s it like working here? Did you use to work for Coughlans?”
It was at this point we learned that the guy who had served me had previously worked in the Coughlans warehouse, a place, I imagine, where banter was unfettered by the need to worry about the sensibilities of the clientele. The ex-warehouseman was grateful, he said, to have a job after three months of unemployment between being laid off by Coughlans and taken on by Janes.
“They’re wankers!” announced Biscoff man.
You win some, you lose some: Traitors winner Romesh Ranganathan
Or, perhaps, he had read the Inside Croydon piece in which Coughlans CEO, Sean Coughlan, blamed the company’s demise on the Labour government’s 2024 hike in employers’ NI.
It turned out to be the latter. The “wankers” were the Labour government. Biscoff man really did not like them. He worked locally, he announced. His boss had told him that the NI rise was costing him thousands. Wankers! And another thing, he said, “No one I know votes Labour. No one.” This was interesting, I thought, we are on the verge of a conspiracy theory. What was going on?
No one was taking the bait so he took it up a notch. “That Sadiq Khan. No one likes him. No one voted for him!”
“I did!” I said, as quietly and calmly as I could. I really didn’t want a confrontation but there is a point when the temptation to call out nonsense overrides prudence.
He turned and said, “Yeah, Asians voted for him. He got the ethnic vote.”
The ethnic vote? Aren’t all votes ethnic votes? I mean, we all have ethnicity don’t we? I didn’t know what to say, except to repeat that I had voted for him and that, given that he had won three times in a row, several other Londoners must have, too.
“Nah!” he said.
“It’s not an opinion,” I said, “It’s just numbers”.
He changed tack: “Right” he said, “I’m going to be brutal. What good has Khan ever done, eh? What has he ever done, eh? He’s done nothing, Name one thing…” While he repeated his question, I answered him three times that one of the most important and effective of Khan’s measures was the freezing of public transport fares, a key bonus for hard-up working people in these straightened times.
He changed tack again.
“Well, he’s an arrogant wanker.” Biscoff man was getting louder. The manageress and the ball gag guy had downed cakes and had become a full-time audience.
I didn’t respond to this. I mean, that really is an opinion, to which he is absolutely entitled. So he changed tack again.
“Do you work?” he asked me. It felt a little intrusive and it felt as if he was ready to categorise me as the sort of useless person who might support Sadiq Khan. He couldn’t class me as Asian, so work-shy scrounger would have to do.
I answered in the affirmative, but he pressed the point. “What do you do?”
“I’m a teacher,” I said.
And that was it. He rolled his eyes. “Hah!” Point proven, victorious, he sashayed out of the building. He had caught me red-handed. I was a member of the woke, left-wing Establishment, along with the Civil Service and the BBC, rather than a bona fide member of the Great British public who happened to see things a bit differently from him.
He was able to leave with his belief system intact.
I looked at the staff; they looked at me. It was if we had just shared a moment of avant garde theatre. They apologised. “We are all entitled to our opinions but…” said ball gag man, “he shouldn’t have asked you if you have a job. That was rude.”
I said it was fine, because it was, but I couldn’t help but think about Romesh Ranganathan, the British comedian of Sri Lankan “ethnicity”, most recently the joint winner of Celebrity Traitors, who had invested in Coughlans and taken part in a huge round of promotional activity to support them, so enamoured was he of their extensive vegan range.
What do you have to do to be accepted in this country if you are “ethnic”?
For some people it doesn’t matter that you invest your savings in a local business or work hard to make public transport affordable after winning the single biggest personal mandate in British political history, you will always be “ethnic” and have ulterior motives.
By the way, a vegan sausage roll is £3.75 in Janes and £1.35 in Greggs. Gails don’t do a vegan sausage roll but you can get a roasted sweet potato and freekeh salad (I have no idea) for £7, so that’s all right.
Anyway, I am not sure I would recommend the quiet, refined atmosphere of Janes to anyone. I imagine the branches in places like Oxted and Ranganathan’s home town of Crawley are neither more nor less likely to attract a clientele with a wide variety of views. I enjoy a political discussion over a coffee and a croissant as much as the next person but I think that next time, I might opt for a quieter breakfast and just get a take away from Greggs.
The bacon sandwiches there are great, by the way.
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