Childhood stuff #6 - Bakers Oven

It seems like everything from my childhood is slowly being killed off. My holiday haunts, my favourite food, my sanity. The other day I learned about the sad demise of my favourite ever purveyor of baked goods - Bakers Oven -

Founded in the North-East of England, Bakers Oven ruled the cut-throat world of sausage roll flogging in the 80s and 90s. For a lot of years, I went every Saturday with my mum to the cafe in our local store. In the front end was a take away bakery, where old ladies would congregate to fight over the last poppy seed loaf. In the back was the cafe - a proper kind of cafe, with those trays you slid along, picking up various components of your meal as you went. My meal of choice (and this was the only meal for sane children to choose) was a sausage roll and a chocolate thick shake. Heaven on a brown plastic tray.

I recently learned that Bakers Oven has been taken over by Greggs. Greggs. This is so wrong on so many levels. This is like Coca Cola being taken over by Gorilla Piss Ltd. I hate Greggs so much that my housemate and I decided we were legally allowed to punch each other whenever we saw one. If our government had any sense, they would only have taxed Greggs, and created a loophole whereby you could avoid the tax by turning the shop back into Bakers Oven. Everybody wins.