The biting winds cut into my skin like frozen razor blades as I dragged my feet one in front of the other down Baker Street. Tourists dot the pavement with their expensive cameras looking for any and all Sherlock Holmes inspired signs to take back with them and show their family and friends; a picture of something about someone who didn’t exist, a red bus, a London phone booth. I swung a left and pushed open an oily door to the finest fried chicken establishment on the strip, KFC.

I marched over to the counter being careful not to slip on the greasy floor and locked eyes with the shift manager. “One Double Down meal, please,” I ordered, not looking up at the menu. I knew what my day consisted of and I was there to turn planning into present.

“What drink would you like?” he responded. “Pepsi,” I said knowing damn well that nothing else apart from the Double Down mattered at this point.

Around a minute later, my sandwich tumbled down from behind the curtain to the front of house. The manager slid the freshly assembled Double Down back up the metal slide demanding that the young man behind the scenes put a sticker on the wrapping to seal the freshness. The young man soon pushed the sandwich back down along with some excuse that he couldn’t find any stickers; at this point, I wanted to rake my nails down the manager's face to stop this greasy version of Pong from continuing. I wanted my damn meal, sealed wrapping or not.

A bag of shiny fries and a regular Pepsi soon flanked the prized sandwich atop the paper sheet on the slimy red tray. I sat in a booth downstairs (after wiping what I hoped was water away from the seat) and ripped open the wrapping.

On paper and their marketing pictures, the Double Down looked like the best thing ever since sliced chicken for bread, but what greeted me looked like two scrotum-covered oven mitts sandwiching a small stack of Post-It Notes with a stingy helping of BBQ sauce, but as KFC is my guilty pleasure I knew that presentation is lower on their list even more so than wiping down tables.

I picked up the war-torn-looking slabs of possibly repurposed chicken and bit into it. Not even the insultingly loud and totally shit music blasting from the potato speakers that lined the ceiling could distract me from the hauntingly plastic taste of the cheese. It’s as if someone asked an original Furby to recreate the flavour of cheese using the resources of a high school chemistry lab.

The breaded chicken skin faded away upon touch like crepe paper on a wet floor housing an impressively watery chicken breast, leaving my fingers looking like I had shoved them up inside a rotting corpse I had found within a thicket. I powered through my self-made ordeal. Each bite of the sandwich added weight to my frown and each swallow felt as if the last one was coming back up.

Sadly, nothing about the Double Down was worth my time being there nor worth the time I had chipped off from my life total and still, the radiantly yellow cheese slices danced their ghostly aftertaste in my mouth, long after I had purposefully given myself brain freeze to numb my entire head.