Mick Hartley

Last week Giles Coren was railing against the Full English breakfast – “You never see anyone with a degree eating a fry-up” – and now it’s MacDonald’s and their uniform change:

We usually go into McDonald’s because we feel terrible. Drunk, hungry, hung-over, barely £2 in our pocket, all self-respect out the window, we push past the weeny bike thieves and kitten-stabbers gathered in the doorway. We keep our stomach together despite the slide of our feet on the cow-greased floor (is there ever not a sign up telling you the floor is slippery?) and the smell of a Swaledale field at the height of the cow-burning epidemic.

We catch sight of ourselves in those mirrors, lit by the merciless white neon overheads (I swear, I still have teenage acne in those mirrors), we jostle amid the giant-arsed women and the bag-snatchers who have come in only because KFC is shut and are grumbling about the high cost of the chicken nuggets, and when we finally come to order, we do not want to be made to talk, thank you very much indeed, to Helena bleeding Christiansen.

You know what I mean? We want a spotty teenage loser in a skid-mark-coloured shirt that drains all the colour from his pasty face. We want a woman, squeezing between the chip-fryer and the milkshake machine, in a blouse you could make into outfits for a whole Brownie pack. We want a man whose polyester shirt sparks in the dark and out of which the smell of BO can never quite be washed. We want someone, in short, who is even lower down the food chain than we are. Someone in whose opinion we are not even slightly interested.

Yes I know that buried deep beneath the snobbery there’s some kind of attempt at humour. If you read his restaurant review columns, he plays up the upper-class brattishness. It’s his trade-mark. Maybe he wants to be A.A. Gill. But this is just horrible. The contempt for the lower orders – the people who can’t afford the £80-a-head meals he regularly reviews along with his latest “flopsy” as they head back from their Wodehousian weekend break – is palpable. Makes me want to head straight down to MacDonald’s for a Big Mac special, hand over a £20 and say, “That’s alright, keep the change.”

Best MacDonald’s experience? In Paris, where you get a decent cheap quick lunch without being ripped off in some tourist hell-hole having waited an hour to be served. Besides, there’s something particularly pleasurable about going to MacDonald’s in France.