Costa Take Over The Whitbread Prize...Oh Goody!

The Guardian (who don't answer my emails), report today that the Costa coffee chain is going to be the new sponsor of the soon-to-be-erstwhile Whitbread literary prize. Well, that should certainly strike a blow for experimentation, innovation, eccentricity. Every high street in England is identical thanks to the proliferation of these (and other) homogeneous weirdly-1980s coffee franchises that the average shopper seems to consider so diverting and sophisticated. To me they're like spooky facsimiles of real life conjured up by the tormented minds of the dying.