Nice: Stuart Heritage explores the theme of nice through a dishonest biscuit

According to Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Kevin Spacey was talking out of his arse. Deep down, everybody knows the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was stamping the word “Nice” on those biscuits.

Now that I’m a wildly successful media tycoon, the only biscuits I eat are triple-chocolate Taste The Difference cookies from Sainsbury’s. You know the ones. They’re the size of a dinner plate. They’re baked fresh each day. They cost £2.50 for four. You eat them wearing a top hat and a monocle, gazing down disdainfully at the scummy proletariat who joylessly scurry around several hundred feet below the window of your penthouse apartment, miserably pushing Jammy Dodgers into their rotten mouths. You know the ones. Those biscuits are delicious. If any biscuits deserved to have the word “Nice” stamped on them, it should be those. But no. Oh no. They can’t have the word “Nice” stamped on them because Nice biscuits got there first.

If you ever wanted proof that the world is a cold and unjust place, just take a look at a Nice biscuit. It’s a drab, flat, beige, atom-thick rectangle of weaponised disappointment made from nothing but tear-stained sawdust and hopelessness. It looks like the sort of thing that bad parents used to make their children eat with a knife and fork in the 1950s. It is the recipient of exactly zero pleasant thoughts from anyone, ever.

And it’s got the word “Nice” written on it. It’s an act of sarcasm so brazen that it genuinely takes your breath away. Nothing about a Nice biscuit is nice. Nobody has ever had fun eating a Nice biscuit. There’s a good chance that nobody has ever eaten one willingly. They exist just for the sake of existing, to permanently linger on the edge of your periphery and remind you that you’re ultimately alone in this universe.

Did anyone actually taste one of these things before they settled on Nice? I doubt it, or else they’d be called Glum biscuits or Sigh biscuits or, if they were feeling especially cocksure about themselves, Perfunctory biscuits. But Nice? No. That’s simply a step too far.

You’re reading a magazine made by a publishers with “Nice” in their title. The biscuit’s wilful misuse of the word should make you want to rise up. Heads should roll for this! Blood should spill! Or, more realistically, polite letters should be written and then never sent.

And yet the Nice biscuit continues undeterred. “But look how decadent we are!” it cries. “We’ve got scalloped edges! We’re like something from Caligula or 1920s Berlin!” Too little too late, biscuit. You lost us at the word “Nice.” Burn in hell, you biscuity cocksucker.

Unless, you know, it’s meant to be pronounced “niece.” In which case, disregard everything I just said.