Greggs is romance

After writing a piece in January about losing my favourite cafe, I realised an answer is sitting on almost every high street.

Turns out, I’d been cheating on San Co Co all this time.

My codependent affair with Greggs started when I was at school. Me and my friend Katy would go every lunchtime. We had this little ritual: a cup of tea (two sugars at the time, grim) and, for me at least, the famous sausage roll.

I think she just had the tea.

In my uni days, so many days started with a Greggs run — friends would wake up all over the house, then pile into the cars for coffee and pastries before another blissful day of music, boozing and smoking.

San Co Co mattered because it was romantic. It had edges. It had limits. It felt like a relationship. When that changed, it was personal, it felt like a breakup or something.

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s affair started whilst he was still married to Jennifer Aniston. Like any good affair, Greggs is San Co Co adjacent. Greggs sits right next to places like San Co Co at the Oscars’.

But Greggs is far less personally intimate, and far more democratic. It doesn’t recognise you, but it does recognise need. All Greggs cares about is that the donut you ended up with makes the next ten minutes better.

Greggs is so honest about what it is. I love that.

You just walk out holding something warm and beige, handed to you by someone in a hairnet. It’s giving really good school dinners. You point at a thing. They give you the thing. No one performs taste in the Greggs queue. Builders, sharp dressed folks, office workers, a guy who stinks of weed. Just people who rate butter, really.

When I was 18 or 19, I read a fair few self-help books. Mostly nonsense, I can’t say much of it stuck. The only thing I really took away was this one line that said: “Start your day with a warm breakfast.” Greggs gives you that. I think we tend to romanticise the edgier places. But sometimes what you need isn’t just edge. It’s familiarity.

And that’s the philosophy hiding on the pastry shelf.

Reliability is good.
Consistency and predictability are care.

Maybe spontaneity and novelty are more attractive.

But I see you. You still reach for the familiar every now and then. And honestly, halfway through a tough day, that might just be one of the purest forms of kindness.