Stuck at home at the minute with a couple of wannabe plumbers banging around upstairs attempting to fix SOMETHING. I'd decided that the sort of “all-rounder odd jobs men” that you get here are on the whole pretty useless, because it seems to take them 80 times longer than a specialist to get anything done. My reasoning for this is simply that of economics.
When you get a plumber in, it costs you about 40 quid a second to have them there. The last time we had one here though, it took him 15 minutes to fix a problem that had taken 2 or 3 lots of “maintenance blokes” about 5 days to do.
Clearly the guys upstairs are underpaid, cos they're taking forever ! So I thought as I don't want to leave them unattended in the place (they seem a bit dim – they'd probably forget how to operate the front door if not prompted), I might as well post something on my website.
I don't appear to have the photos from Germany on my laptop yet, and I can't be arsed going in to get my camera. So maybe now is instead the appropriate time to release my photographic essay on chicken shops on the unsuspecting world…
What it boils down to is that the other day whilst walking across to Homebase (to buy something they of course didn't have) I noticed that there were what I perceived to be an awful lot of (interchange those words as you will) chicken shops on the Willesden High Road, so on the way back I thought it'd be interesting to photograph them all. Clearly, I was wrong, but it's done now, so suffer.
What intrigues me is that we're not talking about a particularly long stretch of road really… and yet there's 6 chicken shops ! I didn't count kebab places, pizza joints, or fish and chippies in that, although many of their wares are reported to also contain chicken. For the purposes of the exercise, I meant only the real “chicken shop” type places, like Golden Chicken back in Australia.
There tend to be a lot of these things here in London, and a great many of them seem to be trying to emulate KFC branding (obviously with “subtle” changes) in such a way that you might not notice you're actually not going to KFC. If that makes sense. Maybe there's (oh god, no !) another instalment of this photographic study to be done yet ?
I can authentically report that the quality of substance prepared in these establishments TYPICALLY* sits at a level far below that of the aforementioned establishment of The Colonel, and some of you will marvel that such a thing was possible I know.
Bloody hell, what else can I say about chicken shops ? It's pretty insidious the way they've put one just next to Kensal Rise Station – it's the point where you normally have to swap buses to get back to my house, and after a night out at the boozer it can be extremely hard to walk past a chicken shop. And yet these things are that awful that I've managed to resist EVERY time. Are you getting the message, people !?
OK, I think I've made my point**.
* obviously based on the 3 that I've tried in the last 6 months, and not necessarily the ones photographed (in case my statement provokes any kind of legal ramification)
** anyone who can actually FIND a point in this post, please advise by email and you may (unlikely though) be eligible for a prize of some description***.
*** I wouldn't count**** on it though.
**** speaking of counting, I guess some of you noticed that I said there were 6 chicken shops, whereas in fact there are 7 photos. This is because I'm a bit of an idiot and forgot one. OK, I'm really going now.