The Missing Croissant

Thursday is Middle of Lidl day, which is less a shopping trip and more a controlled archaeological dig through the ambitions of mankind.

You go in for milk and emerge having seriously considered purchasing a plasma cutter, thermal leggings, and something described only as a “precision rotary implement”. It is a place where logic loosens its grip and the human brain becomes unusually receptive to owning things it did not know existed twelve seconds earlier.

It was during this heightened cognitive vulnerability that Lidl informed me I had earned a free croissant.

I accepted this news with calm detachment. It was skinny day, so the croissant existed purely as an abstract nutritional concept intended for Hayley. I selected the fattest specimen not out of desire, but out of principle. If one is to accept a free croissant, one must do so properly. I scanned it. The machine acknowledged it. The croissant and I were, from a legal standpoint, briefly united.

And then I forgot about it.

This was entirely rational at the time. The croissant was not part of my personal economic framework. It was a third party asset. A diplomatic pastry. I packed my shopping, left the store, and drove home with the untroubled mind of a man whose croissant situation was, as far as he knew, fully resolved.

It was only when I began unpacking at home that the first crack in reality appeared.

Milk. Present. Yoghurt. Present. Random Middle of Lidl item whose function I will determine sometime in 2028. Present.

Croissant. Absent.

At first, I assumed it would reveal itself. Croissants are flamboyant creatures. They do not go quietly. But it did not emerge. I checked every bag with growing urgency, as though it might respond to a sufficiently authoritative tone. Nothing.

This was the precise moment the croissant achieved total psychological dominance. While it existed, I did not care. The moment it ceased to exist, it became the single most important object in the universe. Its absence filled the house. It accused me silently. Lidl had entrusted me with a croissant, and I had failed in my custodial duties.

Somewhere, it continues without me. Perhaps still on the packing shelf, staring into the middle distance, wondering why it was abandoned. Or perhaps it has already been claimed by another Middle of Lidl wanderer, a man who arrived seeking a cordless tyre inflator and left with something he did not earn.

This is the true danger of Middle of Lidl. You go in expecting nonsense. But occasionally, it gives you something meaningful.

And then, through carelessness, you lose it.

I did not care about the croissant.

Until I understood that it had cared about me.