hey man, now you're really living....

At the supermarket this week, I tried to liven up my mundane life by changing my breakfast cereal of choice.  Now, normally of a morning, I like to have a sesame seed bagel with some marmalade or golden syrup or something lightly spread across the top.  I do like my bread, after all.  On some mornings though, I just hanker after something different.

It is for mornings like those that I keep a box of cereal in my kitchen cupboard.  Yeah.  That's how I roll.  I've tried various sorts, but my default cereal of choice is Crunchy Nut Cornflakes.  I find their advertising tedious in the extreme, but I like a cereal sweet enough without being entirely infantile or smothered in chocolate.

Anyway.  I wanted a change.  After a few seconds of consideration, I picked up a box of original Alpen and popped it into the trolley.

Living the dream.

In some ways, it's a nostalgic choice.  We used to have this at home when I was growing up and it's a very aspirational cereal from the 1980s.  It's worthy enough, up to a point, but it's not quite in the same category as some of those newer, pricier mueslis and granolas that look like unsweetened bird food - never mind the fact that anyone who has any kind of middle class pretension is mixing their own granola nowadays.  Yeah.  It might be naff, but I've never been a dedicated follower of breakfast cereal trends, so Alpen would certainly do for those mornings when I don't fancy a bagel.

It would do just fine.

My wife wasn't so sure:
"Why have you picked Alpen?"
"I like Alpen"
"But it's a woman's cereal"
"What?  Why would you say something like that?  How exactly is Alpen a woman's cereal?"
"They sponsor 'Grey's Anatomy' on the telly"
"Oh.  Right".

I bought it, but such is my disapproval of their televisual sponsorship choices that it tastes like ashes in my mouth.