Tony Gilkes is a very English hero. The Middlesborough pensioner wanted nothing more than what all hungry Englishmen want: a hearty meat pie. Yet when he tried to procure pastries from his local Morrisons at 8.45am he was rebuffed; staff at the supermarket refused to serve him before 9am. So what did Gilkes do? He went to war on the retail chain until it backed down and agreed to serve flaky fare from 7am. But most English of all was Tony’s suspicion that sinister motives were afoot. He mused:
‘There’s more to this. Morrisons have got their own agenda. They don’t want people to know about it. They have given too many ridiculous stories about why. They contradicted themselves over and over.’
Something didn’t smell right and it wasn’t processed meat wrapped in suet.
What more delicious, if calorific, symbol of the paranoid moment we are living through? Francis Wheen identified the seventies, decade of Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and plots real and imagined against Harold Wilson, as the ‘golden age of paranoia’ when ‘the grotesque and fantastical had come to seem almost commonplace’.
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