I was still sat in my dressing gown come mid-Afternoon, watching the brilliant Jeff Stelling present Sky’s Soccer Saturday, which is the most entertaining show in the world and all the more impressive as it’s actually just three blokes looking at monitors showing matches you can’t see, saying what’s going on. How and why this show is so good is unfathomable, but it is.
I was feeling lazy and lethargic and my mood wasn’t bettered by the though that instead of being able to sit in all night drinking Cup a Soups and making toast, I had to go to Hull. How selfish of my agent to get me work.
Probably best that I give the Cup a Soups a miss anyway, they annoy me with their stupid name. If it was Cup o’ Soup, that would be fine. It would be quirky, modern take on Cup Of Soup, which is what the product claims to be. It’s not really a soup of course, because it contains none of the essential ingredients of a soup, but the combination of evil chemicals and hot water make it taste a bit like soup and therefore they can get away with their false claims.
But ‘Cup a Soup’. Are they saying it’s a ‘cuppa’ but soup flavoured? A ‘cuppa’ is what British people sometimes call a cup of tea, which is all we ever drink. It comes from us being lazy and shortening ‘Cup of tea’ down to one word. We might say “Fancy a cuppa?�
But that still doesn’t make any more sense out of Cup a Soup because if we were going to ask someone if they wanted a cup of tea that tasted of soup we’d say “Fancy a cuppa, that tastes like soup?� We wouldn’t say “Fancy a cuppa soup?� Soup doesn’t come in cups, it comes in mugs or bowls. We’d say “Fancy a bowla soup?�
So there is really no need for this strange ‘a’ between the words Cup and Soup, and I for one think Bachelors should rebrand their poor quality if strangely satisfying product immediately to avoid confusion. Apart from those who read The Daily Mail and The Daily Express, we are a people who like to welcome foreigners into our multi-racial society but what sort of a chance are people going to have when faced with nonsense like ‘Cup a Soup’? It makes no grammatical sense and is only going to make a mockery of someone’s hard learnt English.
Why is the ‘a’ in lower case? If they’re going to get it as wrong as they have, at least call it Cup A Soup. I think the lower case ‘a’ means that it’s not meant to be taken literally as a word, but more of a sound. The ‘Cuppa’ thing again. The advertising people must have thought that ‘a’ sounds a little bit like ‘of’, so people will understand it means ‘Cup of Soup’ but they will subliminally read the word ‘cuppa’ too, which sounds cosy. Someone probably got paid £600,000 to come up with that.
I think that Bachelors are singularly responsible for the fall in linguistic standards in the UK and should be fined. For every packet of Cup a Soup they sell, they should buy one grammar book for schools.
Chris Cairns gave me a lift over to Hull because he was MC for the night. When we got to the venue, The Piper Club, I realised I’d played a gig here many, many years ago. It made me realise that I’ve been doing this too long. Years have faded into years, one indistinguishable from another. Gig was fine. Didn’t mention Cup a Soups.
It’s horrible having to face a long drive home when all you want to do is sit around and have a beer, talking to loose women. But beggars can’t be choosers and Chris was kind enough to be driving, which avoids the normal scenario of Sunday trains tomorrow, and so in the car we got.
Had my first Microwave burger at a Shell petrol station. I wont be doing that again. I only went for it because it was called ‘Micro-o-burga’. It wasn’t really.
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