Beauty experts will often talk about the despair they feel when they can no longer get hold of a product they loved, a product to which they had felt a deep emotional attachment. They’ll talk about going to replace a lipstick that was the perfect shade of pink, or the perfume they’d worn since they were 14, only to find that it had simply disappeared from the shelves. Gone, ripped away with sudden cruelty, along with any attachment to it. I know of people who yearn for a foundation that was discontinued in 1998.
For me, it was a doughnut. For a while, my local bakery, a shop that makes a pain au chocolat as big as an adult’s face and a “cruffin” so good that I now don’t hate portmanteaus, would occasionally have this doughnut. It was smallish, plain, and vegan; the vegan part was written on the tag in tiny letters, as if in apology. It was dusted in cinnamon and caster sugar. The simplicity of it was gorgeous. It was light, it was sweet, but not too sweet, and it was devilishly moreish. This doughnut would appear every now and then, which suited its laid-back charisma. It knew it didn’t have to try. It was a treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen kind of snack.
I have had foods disappear on me before. The Percy Pig ’n’ Mix era was sadly, or perhaps mercifully, short lived. The Pig ’n’ Mix was one of Marks & Spencer’s many Percy Pig spin-offs. At this stage, Percy Pig has more franchises than Marvel. As well as the original sweets, you can now buy biscuits, ice-creams and kitchen roll, but that doesn’t quite explain how I, as an adult with fairly mature taste buds, ended up with a bag-a-week habit of pink chocolate snouts and jelly hearts. One day, I went to stock up, and it simply wasn’t there any more. To be honest, I felt no small sense of relief. It may have been a commercial decision (though if it wasn’t selling, what is wrong with people?), but for me, it may have been more of a medical intervention.
This laidback doughnut was a treat ’em mean, keep ’em keen kind of snack
Then there was the Greggs vegan sausage, bean and cheeze melt. Greggs can be a bit flighty, in that you don’t always know what you’re going to get: a sausage roll the temperature of the Earth’s core, or one that has been for a wander around the Arctic Circle before hopping into its paper bag. The VSBC melt, as nobody calls it, was a hangover staple. Nothing better to pick up at the train station to soothe a slightly sore head than a flaky, sausagey pastry. (And what a testament to Greggs that it managed to make vegan cheese, still almost entirely an abomination that tastes of margarine, coconut and bile, not just palatable, but delicious.) Sometimes you’d get lucky and find a hot one waiting; sometimes it was as if it had never existed. I emailed Greggs to find out if it had joined the ranks of the discontinued. It replied telling me it was “taking a short break”, but it is “hoping to welcome it back soon”.
The gaps between the doughnut’s appearances at the bakery grew longer, until I realised it had been well over a year since I’d last seen it. Inspired, I asked the woman behind the counter what was going on. To mention it felt a bit like breaking the rules, as if I was getting too serious about the casual arrangement we’d been enjoying. But I needed answers, even if that meant closure.
“You know that doughnut you used to have,” I began, a little nervously. To add insult to injury, she looked confused. “You know,” I pressed, “the cinnamon one?” Ah yes, she replied. The vegan one. “Are you going to start making it again?” Maybe, she said. It was nice, she agreed. You never know, she shrugged. It didn’t sound like much of a commitment to me. I keep looking for it. It has not shown up yet.
There is a healthy market for food nostalgia, of the Facebook-friendly “remember Panda Pops?” variety, but this is not the same. It’s not about pining for the past. I have no weathered, deep-rooted attachment to this doughnut, other than its scarcity has probably elevated it in my mind. Look at it from a more philosophical angle, though, and the doughnut has lessons to teach us. It is a poignant reminder that everything is fleeting, that nothing is fixed, that we are all at the mercy of life’s whims and impulses. To paraphrase the great Irish poet WB Yeats: things fall apart, the centre has a hole.