BELGIAN HANDJOBS & DANISH PASTRIES

“£2.50?! For a Danish pastry?! Christ, I can get a wank in Belgium for a

tenner, sweetheart!”

So said an overweight labourer to the girl behind the till in the bakers beloved

of working-class navvies, Gregg’s, the other day where I was waiting patiently

in the queue to purchase a couple of jumbo sausage rolls.

Which baffled me.

I didn’t understand the point he was endeavouring to make.

Obviously he felt that £2.50 was too much for a Danish pastry, but his

attempt to highlight this by relating it to the cost of procuring, from a

prostitute I’m supposing, manual stimulation of his engorged member in

Belgium, wasn’t immediately apparent.

At that moment I had no way of knowing whether or not this was value for

money or not, having never paid for the privilege in Belgium myself.

Belgian prostitutes, I would imagine, were as adept as any, irrespective of

nationality, at the relatively simplistic process of stimulating the erect

male organ to the point of ejaculation, so from a western perspective I’m

guessing, particularly for an EU member country, that the equivalent of

£10 for masturbation is actually relatively little. However, I also suspect that in

less prosperous nations the same act could be bought for infinitely less.

What this therefore suggested to me was, that if soliciting someone else

to stroke his penis for as little money as possible was how he enjoyed

spending his earnings whilst abroad, then perhaps he should consider

travelling further afield, for example, to the Philippines or Cambodia

where past experience has taught me that this activity is indeed available

for considerably less than £10 if you shop around a bit.


However, such an original exclamatory statement clearly deserved more

rumination than merely examining his construction of an accurate

cost-scale ratio of Belgian handjobs to Danish pastries I felt.

Did this pig-eyed character with a face like a glazed ham possess a more

comprehensive set of figures gleaned from increasingly gratuitous sexual favours

on offer in the Lowlands with which to determine the true cost of all manner of

items for sale in Britain’s high streets I wondered.

For instance, was he to be heard whilst in some dreadful high street fashion store

such as Top Shop buying a sweater:

"£20?! You can get a blow-job in Belgium for that much mate!"

Or in the electrical outlet Dixons browsing for a CD/Radio/Cassette deck:

"£50?! You can get a shag in Belgium for that much mate!"

Or in gaudy furniture chain DFS buying a three piece suite:

"£1000?! You can get a drug-fuelled orgy with two rentboys in Belgium

for that much mate!"

Or in a second hand car lot buying a used BMW: "£10,000?! You can

sodomise a classroom of underage schoolboys in Belgium for that much

mate!”

Where did it end?

Returning to his lack of global awareness on these matters however, I

realised that in hindsight, after he’d harangued the peasant girl in Gregg’s

for the exorbitant cost of the Danish pastries by equating them with the fiscally

favourable price a handjob could be procured in Belgium, I should have

retorted with, “Ten quid?! For a wank?! You can buy a harem of underage

sex slaves in Burma for that much, mate!”


Was this skewed fiscal logic deployed by any other people in life beyond that of

oafish British labourers I then wondered further.

Did terrorists balk at the price of semtex with similar comparisons?

“£100?! For a kilo?! I can get a threesome with a couple of western harlots for

that much in Belgium, Ali!”

Or were terrorists similarly outraged by the price of Danish pastries that they too

were often moved to berate the employees of high street bakeries in the UK

with the economic extrapolation the cost plastic explosives were available for

in Belgium?


But it was the choice of Belgium in relation to red light district activity that was

perhaps the most unusual aspect of this entire incident; the Flemish country not

being one I immediately associate with cut-price sexual favours.

But then, perhaps that's just me.

Perhaps this gentlemen was not really a labourer at all but instead a

representative of a radical wing of the Belgian Tourist Board posing as a gruff

brickie in order to spread the word around British building sites that sexual

favours were to be solicited for eyebrow-raisingly favourable prices in Belgium

thereby, albeit in questionable circumstances, attracting a greater volume of

foreigners into the country who had previously thought it was only good for

chocolate and bureaucracy.

Of course, it was then only a matter of time before it finally dawned on me that

converse to this oik's original proclamation, cake-loving British fatties may

similarly be heard balking at the cost of handjobs in UK brothels.

“£50!?! I can get the same number of Danish pastries in Belgium for that much,

sweetheart!”

And so finally, all of this having shot through my already frazzled head in the time

it had taken the brazen builder to fork over the cash for his Danish pastries; which

he bought despite his vocal recalcitrance; I came to pay for my two jumbo sausage rolls.

“£1?! For a couple of sausage rolls?! I can buy three goats, a sack of rice,

two dozen hand grenades and a year's supply of children in Chad for that much, sweetheart!”

Which is what passed through my mind, but not actually my cracked lips.

You see, I already knew that two jumbo sausage rolls cost £1 in Gregg’s and felt them to

be, given the exorbitance of most other food items in central London, especially for those

in such dire financial circumstances as myself, bloody good value for money as it happens.

- Lord Montague Byron-Swade