Well, that was unexpected.

On walking into the Harrow Pizza Express and seeing the dirty white walls, the peeling red paint on another wall, the battered menus stained with food (or blood; I hope the former) and the flaky paint on the ceiling I thought this post would be nice and straight-forward. Having previously found mostly very smart Pizza Expresses with the occasional nook or cranny that wasn’t really up to scratch (such as the Upper Street stairs), I’ve finally found one that is just all round a bit run down and tacky. Not even a Dyson hand dryer in the male toilets. Instead, an old and broken rolling towel.

The toilet signage is boringly on-brand, featuring people of normal proportions. (Apologies to any new readers to this series of blog posts; suffice to say that the toilet signage in Pizza Express outlets is often more worthy of comment than you may think, especially where lederhosen is concerned.)

But then, the moment of automated bureaucratic genius which came to light when I part-paid with an electronic gift voucher. First came the inevitable reading of the terms and conditions, which once again makes me wonder quite what the lawyers who check over these things are sometimes thinking for they have the obvious error that whilst the electronic voucher says it is valid for one day less than a year, the T+Cs say the voucher is valid for two years.

Then came some odd references to how the voucher would appear on your credit card statement, presumably – if not clearly – referring to the person who had purchased the electronic gift voucher. So the person who had purchased it checked their credit card statement online to see if it matched the T+Cs (hey, it’s the way we Pizza Express fans roll), discovering in the process that the credit card company had classified the purchase as being one of:

Fireworks, trophies or gravestones.

Ah, automated genius at its best. Who can argue with that as a description of a pizza voucher?

So that is 38 down, 100 (or thereabouts) to go.