100 YEARS OLD AND STILL WORRIED BY PASTRIES...

IWAS greatly alarmed by an email I received the other morning about leaving pastries on the seats of London buses. As if our transport system does not face enough difficulty grappling with the problem of sea lions on Tube trains, we are now faced with the threat of finding our nether regions sticky with pastries we have sat on inadvertently after boarding a bus.

The email came from the Dominique Ansel bakery which, a year ago, began production of the Cronut®, a cross between a croissant and a doughnut, which has been a huge success. Indeed, the email told me that in the past year, they have sold 81,238 Cronut® pastries which they say is “enough to place on every seat of 1,232 Routemasters”.

I rang them at once to express my concern. “Will you be arranging for prominent ‘Beware of the pastries’ warnings to be shown on the buses?” I asked. “Can you imagine the misery of a commuter fleeing from the sea lions on the Underground to get on a bus and sit on a Cronut®? It would be out of the pinniped into the pastry.”

“Thank you for bringing this to our notice,” the lady from the bakery said. “The Routemaster figure was included to give an idea of the number sold but if we do decide to put them on the seats of buses, we shall be sure to take your advice and put up warning signs.”

“I’m greatly relieved to hear that,” I said. “I’m sure you could think of other things to do with your doughnuts.”

“Cronut®,” she corrected me. “And do try to put an R with a ring round it after the word. It’s a registered trade mark. I should also point out that the plural is Cronut® just like the singular.”

“Very wise,” I said. “Otherwise you’d face the problem of whether to write Cronuts® or Cronut®s.”

“Thank you,” she said, “but talking of other things to do with them, we have worked out that if you walk from our bakery at 17-21 Elizabeth St, London SW1W 9RP, to the London Zoo in Regent’s Park, leaving a Cronut® trail behind you like the trail of pebbles in Hansel and Gretel, it would take 1,700 Cronut®, which is the number needed to give one to every beast in the Zoo.”

“How can you give them to the animals if you’ve dropped them in the road like pebbles?” I asked.

“You don’t drop them in the road,” she said. “That would be silly and a waste of pastries. I only said that is the number you’d need if you used them to make a trail.”

“You might have to make a trail with something if you want to get back from the zoo,” I pointed out. “You won’t be able to get a bus, after all. The seats are all full of Cronut®, I believe. Anyway, the Zoo idea looks a bit dodgy to me. The elephants will be furious if you only give them one pastry each and you do the same for tiny animals like dung beetles.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Let’s skip the Zoo idea and stay at the bakery. It’s our first birthday next weekend, you know, and we’ll be handing out free slices of Brown Sugar and Plum cake on September 30 and October 1.”

“Don’t tell the dung beetles,” I advised. “They’ll be furious if they know you took away their pastries.”