Iceland Are Taking Over the World? Run! Save Yourselves!

By Alex Allen

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I like writing, which is a good thing, it's what I do after all, but it does have its disadvantages. One disadvantage is that it's always up to the reader how they want to interpret what they're reading. Things like inflections and the tone of the story can be misrepresented or interpreted differently by different people. For example, someone spoke to me today and said 'oh did you hear? Iceland have bought sixty Woolworths stores'. They had assumed it was a positive story, the facts had been laid out for them on the BBC news page and they had seen this as good news. I'd actually already read it, but I had interpreted it rather as, 'oh no, Iceland have bought sixty Woolworths stores'. My interpretation was that this was really rather bad news, that Iceland were expanding their obesity factories across more towns and cities throughout the country. This is the danger of written journalism. On television there are no such problems, George Alagiah either uses his 'Iraq' voice or his 'and finally' voice, and this is how we tell the tone of all news items and how we should feel about them. Still, I'm sure Iceland will save 2,500 from unemployment from this expansion. It's going to kill them all with £1 cheesecakes and potato croquets.

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I always think Iceland must have started out as a bet between two men, one bet the other that not all food ingredients could be served in breadcrumbs and the rest was history. Before Iceland, I had never seen a three litre bottle of diet coke before. People are scared and intimidated by bottles of fizzy drink that size. Yes, people probably drink that much over time, but owning a bottle that size is a frank admission that you are an unhealthy slob, slowly dissolving your teeth. I wouldn't buy one for the same reason I wouldn't buy a 1000KG bag of sugar. I'd probably eventually use it all, but nobody wants to see something that is that bad for them in that sort of quantity. If you care to look at the packaging on Iceland's variety of bread crumbed fare, you will notice that they have chosen not to adopt the standard nutrition wheel to notify consumers of the contents of their products. This is because the colour of that wheel has not actually been invented yet, it's going to be somewhere between conventional black and drowned puppies. I think we'll be able to be certain that the recession is starting to take its toll when someone takes a shepard's pie, curly fries, chicken nuggets and an apple crumble on to Ready Steady Cook. I remember my first visit, it was in the second year of university, I was fairly broke and I went in there and quickly realised that I could survive for about four years from £10 worth of food. I thought that it was the best thing I'd ever seen, it was reminiscent of the first year when I was writing an essay and stumbled across Wikipedia and thought I was going to be sorted academically for life. I sincerely hope that this isn't what diet, or employment for that matter, is going to come to as a result of the recession. Let's not all go mental, things may be rough, but there's no need to hit the freezers no matter how hard our credit has been crunched.