And so it begins. The most wonderful time of the year steamrolls every supermarket's shitty plastic Halloween decorations and decaying pumpkins into the trash, replacing the once-spooky shelving displays with deep reds, rich holly leaf greens, and picturesque images of snow-covered Victorian London streets, which seem laughably out of place judging by the run-down dirty streets that crawl through this nation.

On one typically bleak English afternoon, I strode with purpose through a dismal industrial estate, past a motorway of despondent drivers, to an Aldi staffed by weary workers. This picturesque journey—unfathomable distances away from the idyllic England of American Christmas movies—serves as my sole form of exercise during work hours: a polluted, grey, and grim waltz in a polluted, grey, and grim dancehall.

Filtering through the door, I found myself waiting behind the lunchtime rush of nearby workers, snatching ill-looking chicken wraps and chemically engineered chocolate drinks from the fridges. Off to the edge of the carnage, I spotted a neglected box of untouched sandwiches: vegan sandwiches, specifically the Aldi Vegan Festive Feast sandwich. Pickings are slim for vegetarians where I work, and I’ve often entertained the idea of simply expiring in a backstreet rather than enduring another Aldi cheese pasta—over-boiled pasta topped with grated dusty cheddar. My dull eyes lit up ever so slightly at this gift from Santa. I grabbed one and begrudgingly paid for it, once again assuming the role of an unpaid Aldi employee at the self-checkout. Surely, if supermarkets are cutting costs by not staffing tills, I should either get paid for my efforts, receive a discount, or, failing that, steal more. Two of those options are not going to happen, so next time I might see if a bottle of Champagne scans as a bag of rice. I retraced my steps to my harshly lit office desk, feeling utterly indifferent as I opened the damp cardboard packaging.

If I’d closed my eyes and been told the components of this sandwich without knowing it was from Aldi, I’d have pictured something remarkable. Parsnip fritters, lightly battered and quickly fried, with sage dancing in the background—not to overpower, but to enchant. A chutney with the perfect balance of tangy and sweet, elevating every bite. Onion mayonnaise to soothe the palate and tie it all together. And finally, slices of handmade oatmeal and poppyseed bread, still warm from the oven. Instead, I got this sorry form of shit.

I could’ve chewed this without chewing. Nobody in this country is going to be getting a jawline like Batman anytime soon if this is what the nation feeds upon—barely holdable slop with zero texture that you could, with little effort, drink through a straw. The bread that was described as being oatmeal and poppyseed was like the subpar foam found in shit sneakers, or, as marketeers sell it, memory foam. The impoverishingly thin slice of ‘bread’ was haunting to touch. As soft as the down of a duckling, and twice as shit as one at pretending to be bread. Sadly, most mass-produced vegan food is dry and awful, probably financially garnished by the meat emperors to turn people off the diet, but this Aldi Vegan Festive Feast sandwich was dryer than your mum’s Christmas turkey after being discarded in the Sahara desert sixteen days ago. To try and compensate and stop people from dehydrating into human raisins from a single bite, they had slathered in the cranberry chutney on so thick that the overall taste was ultimately a sage-and-jam mess, and other than looking like compacted sand from a miserable beach, the parsnip fritters added almost nothing visually, and definitely nothing gustatorily.

Hints and dust-covered memories of a festive feast were present, but only in the way you recognise a word you’ve seen before yet can no longer recall its meaning. Familiar, but just out of reach—much like how Aldi interprets a festive feast in sandwich form.