thesamesandwicheveryday

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

11.

I can’t myself believe what time has passed since yesterday and today, my perception is all whacky, maybe I’m getting ill with something. My legs feel heavy and my calves are cramping at the slightest provocation; in reaching for the argan oil hair mask in the shower today they gave way and buckled under and had me tumbling onto the ceramic tiles and there I sat in agony being rained on, thinking about the grouting, thinking about the indoor weather, thinking about that song, what is it? Something something, it sounded almost like a very sad sea-shanty at the start of it, big billowing vocals, the 90s, the woman singing sounded to be really going through it, endless something. But I didn’t have all day to be sitting in the shower thinking of upsetting music, not again, because today’s the day that Ben moved in. He called last night and said “sorry I’m a day out, but it’s going to have to be tomorrow. I assume you’re not busy?” and my need to cooperate with his plans got in the way of both finding offence that he predicted I’d be up to nothing much save for waiting on his arrival, and his lackadaisical altering of the things I’m sure we had set in stone. I don’t know. There’s still a part of me that wants to give Ben an easy life wherever I find an opportunity. I know, he knows, that maybe sometimes I don’t give him an easy life, and it’s always unintentional. This way, with the conscious efforts, the forgoing of my own needs, wants, feelings, I’m redressing the balance before the scales even tip. It’s karma debt. He’ll remember the time I was incredibly laissez-fare about his whimsical fluidity of what I thought were iron-clad plans, and it will be evidence of how easy-going I am. When he accuses me of not being easy-going in the future — and he will — I should hope I won’t have to remind him of things like this, specifically this, the things he doesn’t notice, but ought to. He arrived two hours later than scheduled with his mother and father in tow, all sardined in the front of a red Bedford Rascal, a tiny crate on wheels, and I imagined that once they’d parked on the raggedy cobbles and the door to the flat was safely and effectively wedged as gaping open as it could be, all of Ben’s life would erupt through the back door, out the miniature windows, gasping for freedom after a six hour trundle up north all cramped in. What was peculiar though was how that did not at all happen. Ben’s father (Nigel, they call him Nodge; you don’t have to tell me how odious that is, trust me, I’m aware) seemed to open the back with very little trouble and inside were four, maybe five medium sized boxes, neatly packaged, nothing overflowing from the tops or piercing wonkily through the sides. What else, two large laundry bags, those canvas checked things, both mid-way full. A single bag would’ve done it but Ben is so sickeningly sensible I’m sure he thought the sight of one bulging great hulk of clothes was repulsive, aggressive even; Ben won’t see anything overflowing or superfluous, without feeling a sense of supreme dread and anxiety. And then, something I found rather offensive, something I never knew about my boyfriend — a shoe rack, that had somehow remained intact and orderly on the journey here (actually, Nodge drives like he’s always anticipating an elk might jump out, it’s desperately tedious and slow to be carted around by Nodge, NODGE), all lined up with — and I counted — fourteen pairs of trainers. All of them, just trainers. No smart shoes, no smart casual shoes, no work interview shoes, no funeral shoes. Trainers, mainly white but some red, a rather jazzy blue pair that Ben absolutely could not pull off, all of them still box-fresh as if they’d never met a pavement. Christ, it made me uneasy. I’m moving this man into my home, and this is how he has his shoes. I said to him, Ben, are these all your shoes? And he smiled, this kind of affected cheeky-chappy smile, and his accentless, Hertfordshire tones took on this mockney sway as he said, not as part of a bit or skit, “yeah, that’s all of ‘em, the full works”. I mean, who is this man? I knew I was spinning at this point, I laughed it off but I had to get back upstairs to the comfort of my flat — our flat —no, my flat, I was here first — and get back into the safety of the bathroom where I started to breathe uneven, worsened by the 3 storey sprint, and sat on the toilet with the tap running so nobody could hear my hyperventilate and eventually vomit. I was only in there for perhaps one, one and a half hours. Ben’s family forgive me these kinds of dismissals and disappearances, they know about me and my deal, the medication, the past. I always get this look of soft pity from Dory, his mummy, like she’s trying to bore into my mind with her kind eyes, too kind, and yank out the badness with a soft, blue gaze and head-tilt. She calls herself an empath, so I expect me having those kinds of turns really fucks with her. I don’t know how she gets through the day. I composed myself and the Bens all told me they could really do with grabbing a bite, but being exhausted from what had just happened I requested I hang back because I had household chores to attend to and there’s really no time like the present, and Nodge liked this, because it was wifely, and Dory liked this, because it showed I had some control over my life. Ben said, again, in mockney, “What’s this saaandwich place you’ve been baaanging on abaht?”. I thought he was joking. It really was an extraordinary way in which to articulate oneself when one is from Ruislip, and nobody even said anything. I shot him a look, a sort of, “I see you, I hear you, and I’ll raise this with you later" look, before assenting into a sweet smile and saying, “Yes, I’ve found this really great sandwich stall, you can still catch them, they’re still open.”. The Bens agreed this would be super and quickly I realised Ben would have to give my order for me. The order of the layers, the specific request to hold the cucumber. And who would be on today? Who’s serving? So I threw out a casual, “you guys stay here, I can do the lunch run” but Dory empathically sensed my profound unease and softly laid a hand on my shoulder. “We’ll get them, you stay here and centre yourself sweetheart”. I had to distract myself very quickly. “I noticed earlier on that the grouting wants doing” I said. “Sounds silly but the idea of a dirty bathroom knocks me sick” I said, and I went into the bathroom, closed the door, and leant up against it, listening to them leave and thud down all thirty nine of our stairs, I counted them, and then my calves cramped and released my stance into a crumple once more. I'm still here, wondering if anyone will really notice that I've done no grouting since they left, they’re not likely to check, are they? I’ll do a little. I’ll hum a little tune to myself in the rain and the shower water will at least make it seem as if some work got done. Lord help me if that sandwich comes back all wrong, and give me the strength to find joy and music in this most uncertain time. That song, it’s really embedded in me now. A black and white video; a heavy, sad moodiness, dejection and rain. 

— Got it. It’s k.d lang. It’s Constant Craving.

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

10.

All of yesterday felt like something of a fever dream. After waking up in that flush of memory I was able to eventually get back to sleep but I was restless, maybe even frightened, and by 8am I was back up again unable to discern the date, time, place, unable to really marry the idea of myself to the reflection of me caught in the grubby bathroom mirror amidst the watermarks, toothpaste splashes. When you don’t feel known, knowable, or knowing, what do you even do with that? Who knows you? I threw my clothes on, maybe I wore my jeans or maybe my blue trousers, a white t-shirt or maybe something more formal, I don’t remember, I just know what the fuzzy outline of me looked like from the obscured windows and shop-fronts on my way into the market, at some point in the morning, in some manner of dress. It was mist-raining, that much I’m sure of, because every step I took I felt murky, like the water was sneaking into the fibres of my clothes and it felt unclean and uncomfortable. By the time I made it to the covered market’s great old wooden doors I slinked right through them and looked to the floor and kept moving, and when I lifted my head up again I saw her, behind the glass, running a joint of gammon ham through a meat-slicer, looking despondent. I asked her what her name was, that was the first thing I did. I said to her I’d seen her a few times and thought it polite to introduce myself. She said, “Ham salad, right?”, and I pretended to smile because you’ve got to, always, be seen to be social. I told her, “that’s right!” and I even laughed a little, and said to her this time my name, so she’d say her own back to me. Guess what her name is? Her name is Julie. Julie and I, I realised, were suddenly in conversation, and it occurred to me quite quickly that this was the last thing I wanted and I only realised that when I was deep into that everyday laughter exchange of friendliness and politeness. I’d say at that point Julie and I were on a level of intimacy where she’d feel comfortable discussing casual town gossip with me, but perhaps not comfortable asking me to perform a favour for her, such as watch the stall, or pass a message onto someone. I wonder if Julie and I will ever get there. 

“Ham salad please?” I said, though I wonder if I said it awkwardly and that request landed badly or stuck out of the natural flow too much, and I thought that even though that’s what I’m there for, that’s the exact nature of my visit, it was a subject that suddenly needed to be danced around, because now I knew Julie, and I was getting her to do a job for me so I could give her some money, and that was bad, and good, and hard for me to wrap my head around. But Julie, she didn’t mind at all, with a smile she started to throw my sandwich together — no, not throw, I’m doing her a real disservice by saying that — but watching her I began to cheer up. Because she just did it, and she made it look like art, and I’m not kidding. That sandwich suddenly started to take the form of one of those beautiful cartoon snacks, and the lettuce was green and leafy and the tomato was juicy and plump and the onions were sliced into perfect rings and the ham was thick, and though it was cold, I imagined it freshly carved from a piping hot roast dinner, tossed onto my plate at a Christmas table of cartoon men and women, a seasonal special, me there, nobody else I know but we’re all family. I realised, standing there, that this wave of emotion that had suddenly come over me was unsustainable, I was beside myself. I didn’t cry, but I felt incredibly moved. What tipped it for me was Julie pressing the bread down because listen to me now, that bread roll just sprung right back into its own form. She pressed it down and it immediately just pinged back again and formed a golden, soft dome of dough, the crumb never broke, but I think that’s when I did. It was beautiful. I said to Julie, “actually, could you do me two of those?” and then realised — who asks for two sandwiches and why? Two identical sandwiches? I could lie and say the other is for someone else, but then how do I say that? Because I always ask for her to leave off the cucumber, so — what, suddenly someone else I know wants the same sandwich and also doesn’t want cucumber? But it was either that, or admit they were both for me — no sir — so I told her, “I’ve got a friend coming for lunch” and then realised my mistake — nobody comes for a sandwich! If someone comes for lunch then it’s because you’ve personally prepared something, some platter of cheeses and crackers, a charcuterie board, a fucking quiche, I don’t know, but not two shop-bought sandwiches, and I wondered whatever must Julie think of me? Because however I present myself, however smart I dress or how well I speak, I just told Julie that I’m someone who just pretends — and she’s seen me, over and over again to get this sandwich, and now I’ve revealed that I am a person who buys deli sandwiches and serves them for lunch and that's not even the truth about me, that’s just something I said, so I had to fix it: “not coming for lunch, as such, out of town… he lives in the south”, and I’ll tell you why I said that. I said that because they don’t have good, honest sandwiches in the south of England, and I thought that if I said that, not only would I be getting myself off the hook but also offering some camaraderie as Julie and I could unite together on a playful disdain for the long vowels and their estuaries. So as I said it, I did what I hoped was a knowing face, one of shared humour, a look that said, “if you can believe such a thing” because the south, to the north, to the hard north, is unbelievable. Julie tutted playfully and said: “no proper butties!” and I said back: “no proper butties!” and I laughed because of this warmth, but because I’d got away with it. Something new this time — as there were two, she popped them in a small carrier bag and I carried them home papoose’d in this way, and they felt heavy but were protected one further, and I  felt comforted by that. Before leaving and after exchanging jolly halloos and toodle-pips with good ol’ Jules I took a sharp left before leaving, to find the Sicilian man, because I believed, after this excellent interchange, that perhaps I could cheer myself up by talking about the old country with what’s his face, what were they called again, those Sicilian treats — sfincione — but was it sfin-chee-oh-nee, or was it sfin-chone? I didn’t know, and I didn’t know this more and more until I got to his stall which was closed and though I’d headed there with some purpose I was incredibly relieved, because I wasn’t ready. I was barely ready for a dress rehearsal. It wasn’t good enough. I’d lied enough. I nipped next door to the cheese stall where I asked the unimpressive young man for a fiver’s worth of Morbier and water biscuits and I kept that interaction to a bland minimum because I was beginning to feel exhausted. He wrapped this one in greaseproof brown paper and I didn’t look him in the eye. When I snaffled that parcel from the counter I felt this time like a thief in a Victorian novel, and at this point it was time to run — not walk — home. That was yesterday, and I ate that sandwich half-asleep, over the sink. The Morbier I had for supper with a bottle of St. Emilion and I didn’t call anyone or speak to anyone and my phone did not ring and no texts came. Today I ate the second sandwich for breakfast and wondered if I could get into some kind of sandwich system whereby by the time I want to eat my early day sandwich, it’s already there, I’ve already made preparations for that, and I wondered to what kind of schedule I should stick in order to achieve that, and as that plump, fat tomato I’d fallen in love with burst into freshness and sweetness and joy in my mouth and the salty ham wrapped itself around my tastebuds to lock the flavour in, I felt grateful. Who else gets to eat such food, drink such wine, to live in a place like this? I have been thinking on this all day, and especially about working out this sandwich regime that might improve my life. But I thought about Julie and the door of conversation I’ve now opened with her, and I wondered perhaps that maybe I'd like to never see her again. The Morbier, I still have some of it left. It is rich, indulgent and tasteful, leaves bitterness behind, has a line of dark ash running through it, just like we all should. 

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

9.

It’s 4am right now, and I feel as if nostalgia woke me up the way a nightmare would, but it was nothing scary — that adrenaline of waking up after witnessing some subconscious terror, it’s physiologically the same — there are electric shocks still running up and down my arms and I feel as if I have to close my windows and check the door is locked but I’m not frightened. This adrenaline is redirected, it’s an excitement more than anything else, and I don’t want to secure the flat to keep predators out but instead to keep this feeling in. I don’t want any of this immediate nostalgia to escape through any nook of this place. I feel like I want to fill my home with it. 2012 was such a good year, it just was. Is it pathological to experience nostalgia for a time that occurred only six years ago? And it’s not that I was happier then, I can’t say that or feel that because objectively it’s just not true, because the nature of happiness changes and what I was happy with then may not satisfy me in the same way now, but something about that year, I don’t know. I’m bewitched by it, the unearthing of my memories from that time. Why haven’t I really sat down and thought of this before? Here in my living room, I am soaked through and agitated, and it’s dark outside still because of weather, or seasons, or perhaps it’s just this valley-pit and how it fails to let the light in — but I’m not really here right now, because I’ve travelled in time and I’m existing in two places at once — I look out the window and I see two windows — this one, that frames the crotchety old Gasworker Street cobbles at the embouchure of Ropshire Road that seems, at this time of day, like a wide open, gaping shark’s mouth and its needly streetlamp teeth all strewn with ale-bottles and other such street plankton and flotsam — but I’m seeing an overlay, the bowing bay window from the Kentish Town lounge I spent those two Summers hazing about in, and the dark, smokey Autumn morning here is dusking lighter to meet the powder hue of a June one in northwest London, and in the thickening silence of semi-rural Yorkshire, I hear the comfort of the non-stop house we had; I hear Will in the kitchen making we-had-an-argument-lastnight bread, I hear him working to a cut-glass woman reading commentary on the radio, I hear the nextdoor neighbours and their long, southern vowels as the squabble once again in the hubbub of a schoolday. I look down now at my own vest and joggers but, like a hologram, bright, white cotton appears as it did then, because cottons were so bright then and I wore so much white, nothing was going to get spilled and if it did, there were more cottons to be had. I see my floor here but I see my floor there too and looking up I see the high ceilings Will and I felt so proud of, as if space were premium real estate and high windows an ensurer of value; the more light, the more space, the more space, the more light, and now the smell of a lit oven and proven dough means I must now close my eyes because I remember it all so richly, and why does it all seem so incredibly clean? You know what, maybe it was the music? Because we seemed to listen to an abundance of it then, we soundtracked it all, I can hear the lucid dream-pop as if it’s coming through the floorboards and I can taste the wisteria from the neighbour’s quiet, beautiful garden where we were sometimes allowed to pick garlic and coriander leaf if I was deigning myself to cook something Eastern in our big, bustling kitchen where my work would be on the table, my performative efforts of university essays gaining themselves coffee mug rings, wine glass rings, poularde au riesling for kitchen supper splashback marks, ending up snagging under the table’s one wonky leg, creased up under the weight of our bodies when the kitchen table became a hurried sine qua non, and the sui generis flavour of sconce-lit, stove-warm late night the same colours as this one here, the Orange Muscat & Flora syrupy warm and round, very round taste, and fresh bathwater holograms rippling up round the skylight, warm all around me in amniosis, Will perched on the seat with the lid down, legs crossed like a grasshoper and his warm body hugging the big, good towel round me and its line-dried taste, and Beach House and Craft Spells and Widowspeak and Warpaint and Blouse and Best Coast and Kurt Vile and Real Estate and Balam Acab and YACHT and Atlas Sound and Memory Tapes and Gang Gang Dance and plans we all seem to had, when I was busy then, when I was — when we were — supper parties and matinees and brunches and openings and galleries and restaurants and pop-ups and the dinner we got engaged over and the dinner during which we announced our engagement and the dinner at which we first spoke about children and the dinner for which we bought new clothes for and the dinner at the place we chose for the reception and the calls we made, and the shape of love being so expansive and bright and light and its flimsy edges that bent and flickered like a blade of grass, rooted, and there were friends then, and they all had such things and jobs and hobbies and loves and how I slipped into that fray with my silk things and linen things and velvet things and leather things and the taste of salted things and infused things and emulsified things and frothed things, and laughing, as we did, and how that didn’t really stop — did I stop laughing, somewhere along the line? When did I stop laughing at things? And how do I start again? When you want to laugh, where’d you start? Where’d you go? Who do you need to know? 

2012 was perhaps an anomoly that I appreciate the pause of. It seems like everything else swims in the same great darkness, whether it was someone else who invited that darkness in or, quite often, me who threw that gloomy tone over my entire landscape the way that I did. There’s light to my every experience, and the light that does creep in creates a tasteful balance in my memory, so that everything can be neutralised, and a new era can begin. It doesn’t hurt to reminisce on these terms, and it feels funny to think about — looking back on it all and seeing what particular flavour of murky I tasted that summer, that semester, that term of employment, that relationship, that year: the nervy dark of me that sat in tepid baths for hours on muggy Sundays in my late teens buzzing like a bandsaw and coming down from amphetamines; the orchestral dark of my several terrible peaks, like great timpani behind grand old curtains pounding those hundreds of mornings when I woke up wondering to what extent I’d half-heartedly risked my life the night before; that mossy dark from the mold-spored pages of a Victorian bodice-ripper of my own private scandals slipping on wet sod and stumbling in and out of shallow lakes with some other hungry dark of deceptive and contrary want. However it came and went, it did so gloomily, and that was on me, I did that — but 2012 was two summers long and none of that film of grit stayed long enough to leave a mark, because someone always washed with me. And it’s not because I’m lonely now because how can I be lonely with Ben? Not even just Ben, how can I be lonely with the people I’m already meeting? How can I be lonely with Hugo around, with Rob and Kat down the road, with the Sicilian market vendor, with the sandwich shop, with the people I’ll meet because when have I ever found it hard to make friends? I do this, I’ve done this, I’ll keep on doing this and doing things because I am not lonely, I am just a wistful person, because how could I be anything but happy right now, when everything — on paper — adds up to comfortable happiness? I’m happy, and how could I not be? There’s nothing I had then, that I can’t still have now. I cannot think of one thing I am missing from my past that lacks in my present because these things aren’t formulaic and times and happinesses change, wants change, and whatever I had then I have right now and if I didn’t, trust me, for an afternoon in 2012 on the Southbank with a lavender martini and a pack of Gauloises and a fucking jambon and juniper-pickled cucumber muffuletta, I would run and get it tomorrow. Fuck tomorrow — I’d run right now in the pissing rain over the moors and break my leg on the crags to go get it and drag it into the present with me now. It’s just silly, isn’t it. I should really get some sleep. 

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

8.

I thought, late last night, after chewing on Will’s visit all evening, that it might be a good time to actually call Ben. It’s not like we’ve not been in touch, but my internet goes down exactly when I want to use it, and I’m starting to wonder just how many messages of mine through their various online media are just sticking out of the low fog I find perpetually above the town even on a good day, I imagine that somewhere between my keyboard and their intended destination they’ve got caught up in a thick cloud, and I think of a side-street thicket that’s had a bag of fridge-magnet words thrown at it, making their own queer kind of poetry as a “goodbye”, a “whatever” and maybe an “incredible” stick out on the topmost branches. So I picked up the phone since nobody uses the phone any more and the later it got the more this incensed me. I’m not one to live in the past but is it curmudgeonly to feel that sometimes a connection really needs to be personal, a real voice across the line? Not each time, but sometimes? Isn’t it just the right thing to do? It’s the right thing to do, I convinced myself, at sometime around 1am, and so I scrolled down to Ben’s number and I confidently tapped, and listened for the ring. The first ring felt triumphant. The second felt amiable. The third felt resilient, but fourth began to feel defeating. By the seventh, Ben picked up. He said “hello?” in that croaky way that people do when they’ve just woken up, so I said, “did I just wake you up?” and he said “no, not at all” in the same raspy timbre, and even though I knew he was lying, I stayed on the line to teach him why you should never lie, at least that’s what I told myself I was doing. Ben was possibly quite happy to hear from me at first, he said he’s been trying to call for a couple of days but each time he’s getting my voicemail, and I’m just going to have to believe that, that his words too have found themselves in that same thicket of fog. Quickly I found I did not know what to say to him, but I get that with Ben quite a lot. It’s no bad thing, I shouldn’t think, but it was then I realised even the phone was not good enough, it wasn’t as personal as I’d like, and for the first time in a while I felt I needed to really see him, really be in his company. I thought he could probably sense this anxiety in my voice and he asked me several times if I was okay, if something was on my mind, before I told him. I said Will came round to drop off my things. And do you know what Ben said? He said, “About time, eh?”. I could barely believe he’d been so flippant about this event. I was not angry at Ben, but I did say to him that actually, it had been quite difficult. Ben said he couldn’t think of why it should be, and I didn’t care to get into it. I started to feel quite cross. Really cross. But what was I to say? I told Ben, I cooed at Ben, that he should go back to bed and get some rest and I would speak to him tomorrow if he was about. He chuckled lightly and said, “you’re cute, thankyou” and before putting the phone down said, “won’t you be glad when you don’t have to deal with this Will stuff anymore? Only a few more days now”, and then I said, “a few more days” with a voice that suggested I was smiling though I was not. I got up out of my chair and got the ladder out of the airing cupboard, and propped it up safely toward the attic to where I half-drunkenly teetered, punching the attic door to bust it open, because I realised in that moment, right after the call, I had no idea what was in my attic and that worried me. I had to know. And would you believe it that all I saw was this cardboard box labelled “BOOKS”? Such a gift! I knew I couldn’t carry it back down so I shifted it further and further toward me by grabbing the top flap of the box and yanking it toward me every so often, and then once it reached the opening of the attic, turned to my side atop the ladder and just pushed the box in such a way that it fell onto the floor. But it gets better than this — the books were all old fusty romance novels, cheap paperbacks that come free with things, there were some self-helps, some very old recipe books, nothing inspiring, but then — a brilliant, royal blue gloss shone from beneath the insipid pages and there it was in all its glory — the Lonely Planet Travel Guide to Sicily. I couldn’t believe it, that here of all places, at this time, in my hands — this felt very much like an intervention, a great one. I flicked through to the first at-random page, and I saw: “Sfincione is a spongy pizza-like Sicilian treat made with tomatoes, onions, and (sometimes) anchovies. Try it at I Banchi in Ragusa, or Francu U Vastiddaru in Palermo”. Right there on the paper, a true gift. The gift of knowledge and therefore friendship, the gift of introduction and social ease. And so I said it to myself, “I Banchi”, “Eee Banchee”, “Eee BAN..chee”, and then, “Sfin-chee-oh-nee… do you sell sfin-chee-oh-nee? I tasted it at Eee Banchee, over in Rrrr-a-GOOSE-ah!”. I couldn’t believe how natural it sounded from me, someone who had never even been to Sicily before, and I thought about that tin of blood orange I bought from the man with the stroke and how I could redeem myself in his eyes. It was 7am now, so I just went out in my pyjamas to see him and say hello and my God, just converse with the man — but his stall was closed. I worried briefly he had died, but I can't afford to worry this much about everything all the time, and I didn't want to kill both my mood and, well, him. The sandwich shop was there, waiting for me and my good mood, the same woman from before, my favourite! And I didn’t even need to ask. I didn't even need to tell her what or how or why — she said, “hello love, same as usual?” and I said, “yes! The same as usual!” before asking, “The Sicilian stall, just by the coffee stall, has he gone?”, and how sweetly she replied, “no love, he doesn’t do Thursdays, but I know he's back on tomorrow?” and as she said this she thunked my sandwich into my two cupped hands with a smile that we both shared together. I thanked her, I paid her, I smiled at her, and I came home again. I can't believe how much I've got done and it’s not even 9am — and let me tell you, the ham is so good today, and the onions so crisp. I've never noticed this with sandwiches but if you smell the bread up-close the dough gives off an aroma that seems to trigger an instantaneous calming response, I felt my pulse lower, my breathing steady itself, like I could have tucked up under a lettuce leaf and slept for all time. Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow I will go and I will ask for sfincione, or maybe even something else! And today, I’m ready to sleep. 

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

7.

Will came round today. He brought my sandwich with him. He brought my sandwich, a canary-yellow, large paper Selfridges bag with neat, wiry black handles, and a palpable sense of unease, and maybe even upset. He hadn’t spent any time planning this visit, it seems, because Will is someone who likes to keep everyone informed of all of his plans at all times, just in case anyone may add any curveballs to events, just in case someone might be late or is driving an unreliable car that could reasonably break down, just in case someone has a tip-off that the weather app on his phone might be lying to him and it will in fact rain on a day where he relied on it being overcast at its very worst, because Will thinks things through to illogical degrees at times, he doesn’t do things off the cuff unless he’s high or very drunk and even then, even when you really think he’s done something quite spontaneous or ran with his heart or even his body for a change, you may find out weeks later that Will plans his spontaneous acts with weeks of prior angst and worry, he will have kept himself awake all night not only thinking about what he’d like to do, but of a thousand reasons why that thing could be the thing that causes the end of the world, that Will leaves a friend’s house at 6am instead of 7am, and then unbeknownst to him, that transgression ripples outwards and the sun supernovas, the earth loses its gravitational pull, birds fall dead from the sky as riots, looting and fucking in the street ensue, because the universe is imploding, and it’s all because of Will. I should’ve given him a key. I said to him, after I answered the buzzer phone, ran down the three flights of stairs, opened the door and guided him back up three flights of stairs all over again, I should have given you a key, but he said nothing, and when we got in through my front door I collapsed down on the sofa, but sickeningly healthy Will stood in the kitchen, breathing steadily, both hands on the counter, nodding his head toward the Selfridges bag that I hadn’t seen him lay down by my table. I thought it was a gift, and immediately after thinking such a thing I wondered if that kind of entitlement really gets anyone anywhere, and then I was quickly taught that no, it won’t, and it’s foolish and immature, when Will told me that he’d done a final sweep of his home and these were my last remains. Before I had a chance to look he already told me its contents: two nightdresses; a red hard-backed notebook that i had intended to be a dream journal, but so far hadn’t been written in (not that he’d looked, he’d never do that); a cheap but sentimental key fob that i bought as a souvenir from Blackpool Pleasure Beach (me and Will on the log flume, of all things); a couple of novels Will bought me, thinking I’d read them; my Le Creusset casserole dish that I hadn’t been able to find recently; and finally, a blister pack of diazepam, 8mg preparation, with thirteen pills missing and only one remaining. That was the first thing I noticed before anything else, when I heard him say that I went over to the bag and fished it out, and after double-checking with Will, it was definitely mine and not his by mistake, took it there and then, and I told him, ‘You’ve got five minutes before this kicks in.’

And he did speak. And for a change, I had to let him speak. It was nothing catastrophic, nor was it tragic or heartbreaking, he just stood there like a best man giving a speech for a friend he knows he’ll never see again, lost to a new wife he only knew as a colleague. He said “I don’t want you to think this is any kind of exorcism or cleansing”, which, as an opener, suggests to me an attempt as a kind of exorcism, or maybe a cleansing. He followed smartly and shortly with, “but it’s time, isn’t it?”. It didn’t seem time, he didn’t seem happy, and I clearly haven’t missed half of that stuff or I’d have asked for it before now, wouldn’t I? I wondered if this had anything to do with Kitty, so I said, “I wonder if this has anything to do with Kitty?” and when he said that my phrasing seemed accusatory, I told him I had just been a victim of spontaneously thinking out aloud, and he laughed, the insensitive bastard. But he’s right, and I came round to that off my own back, because we all have a Kitty somewhere. Ben’s moving in very soon, we knew this was going to happen — no, I don’t mean to word it as if his inevitable moving in with me is like the inevitability of chicken pox, I mean we knew this was going to happen because we’ve spoken about it for two years, and if he doesn’t that's the end of us, and Ben really doesn’t want that to happen and I’ve never given an insincere ultimatum. I felt as if I could be seen as peevishly pulling the plug out of frantic spite when I said to Will that just as we knew we’d have to tone down our friendship a bit for Ben’s sake, maybe a full shut-down is more apt, given past animosities and now this quite ceremonial purge, and I don’t know, it’s weird isn’t it, getting drunk all the time, taking valium together. Will seemed to sting slightly when I said that, like I was scripting his life somehow, and that split-second face he gave me, like a peacock ignored, made me wonder why he’d wasted four whole years, shedded so many unnoticed quills for me. I didn’t say that to him, because I feared he might have a well-prepared answer, either a vengeful one recounting beautifully each instance of my bad behaviour and what that means about me, or worse — an elegy of sorts, something plainly beautiful instead. All of these thoughts I had sat on the janky futon, Will and the blue corona of sad light around him, and the waxen blue it made his face, and the inky blue it made his hair. I think that might have hurt me, and I’m not about to get hurt, not when I’ve got Ben — yes, hello, Ben — I said, as soon as I remembered: “he’s moving in next week” and Will said, “I know, I just said this whole thing…” and then asked me  why I’d interrupt him precisely there, then asked this time if I’d just listened to anything he’d just said, and it occurred to me I hadn’t at all. Ben’s not called in days but then he doesn’t really, because if I learned anything from my time with Will it’s that it’s probably not healthy for a couple to talk every minute of every day, because whilst I may not really know the logic behind mine and Will’s separation that summer, we both were saying things about that, about what it’s like when you live in each-other’s pockets, drinking gin and watching game shows, and how even if it feels like those are the happiest days of your life, they’re probably killing you. “Ben’s moving in next week” I said, and Will said he was happy for us, honestly, but he doesn’t know the man. And Will had this look of very vague confusion, I wondered what he’d mislaid when whatever he said next came out of two mumbling lips, inches below quite a Stan Laurel furrowed brow, and then a half-laugh without me noticing the gear change, and I said, “Ben’s moving in next week”, and Will said, “you’ve made your point”, but he said it like he was proud of me. He left about three or so hours ago and I've had this sandwich sitting in front of me on my plate for no more than twenty minutes. I took a bite and it has cucumber, so I put it back down and I’m just psyching myself up again to eat it, because Will would have planned how this just went down to the letter, and if I know Will — and I think I do — if I don’t actually eat it, the world might end. I’m going to pour a big old brandy, and I’ll just eat it really fast with my eyes closed so it’s just over really quick. 

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

6.

A man was found dead in the canal near my street today. I took a walk into town, we’re having one of those freakish, inexplicably bright and sunny days that comes in like a surprise guest around this time of year, settling in for the briefest time, saying its hellos and smiling, but always leaving an hour before time. It’s the back-from-working-abroad friend, weather that talks of countries you don’t know about, their flavours and accents, but eventually and understandably, must leave, because this isn’t home. This town is sort of half-gentrified, so I took a peek in some of the few charity shops dotted up and down several streets that are each — I believe — having a competition with each-other to see who can be officially known as the high street. I can tell you now I think Ropshire Road is winning, and the factors that led to this conclusion are threefold: — it is the main route through the town, a-roads and winding country-lane shortcuts notwithstanding. — there’s a proliferation of shops but especially there are two bookshops, and hear me out: one is independent, yes, but the other is commercial. My thinking is that the independent bookshop opened first and the commercial place recognised this as a prime location and opened up hoping to compete. That was my second clue. — there are several cafes but none of them boast outdoor, Parisian style seating, whereas most of the cafes in the rest of the town do allow you to dine al fresco should the mood strike you. This was the tip-off; that it’s a bustling street, so bustling in fact, that it must be the high street. You come to my town, you’d recognise this as the main high street and I would happily correct anyone who thought otherwise with these three irrefutable reasons. You’d think in a town such as this the charity shops would be full of barmy old rarities and vintage couture just accidentally strewn in with the recycled supermarket tat. I rather thought I’d find myself with the unique pleasure of rifling through some dusty old garms and find myself a Louis Vuitton hold-all, maybe a Burberry coat, but then I realised this is a town halfway through the gentrification process — it was poor before and is only just becoming rich. It’s nouveau riche. As such, anyone with half a brain would return back to the town in 25 years time when the newcomers are either dying off or have lost their jobs and have given back to the town by donating their clothes. So I didn’t really get anything that I wanted but I picked up this tiny book, just the right size to fit into my breast pocket, Weldon’s Popular Edition Etiquette For Gentlemen: A Pocket Companion to True Politeness, and from it I learned some really quite essential tips on how to be in company or at table. “You should not whisper in company nor converse with another in a foreign language. If what you say is unfit to be spoken aloud, leave it unsaid.” I thought of Will when I read that and how he and his sister will often break into French for no reason at all, and this connection led me to the cash machine to see if his allowance had come in yet — it had, thank god.  

Just as anyone who’s just been paid slightly more than they thought they were going to get would, I almost pranced to the covered market. Really I could've gone to the expensive Co-Operative or even the Italian deli on the corner opposite my street, but truthfully, all I wanted was my sandwich and I like to think this is because I’m unpretentious.

I tried not to think about the boy from yesterday because I was feeling just fine, and even though I don't know this man I don't like the potential he has to spoil my day, but I realised he really could, so the closer I got to the doorway of the covered market the more I began to panic. It’s just like when you walk home in the dead of night and the lads have all got lucky so no one can walk you home, and you know that soon you're going to be safe and dry in your living room, but when your front door is in sight that’s when you can’t breathe. That’s what it was like. To make it worse, a few people I’d not seen before, young adults with cameras, had chosen the doorway of the covered market as a place where they could congregate, perhaps to compare f-stops and the size of their apertures. I don't know. I don't pretend to be much of a film expert, but that’s what I gathered from looking at them, and I don't know if they sensed something from me or if it was just one of those amazing things, but as I got to the door of the covered market the crowd parted and I was able to pass through with comfort and ease, and my panic was all but gone when I saw the back of who I rightly assumed to be my favourite sandwich maker, who I’m not sure if I should get to know or not, it’s too early to tell, and the interaction was so easy and she did such a great job, everything so fluid, friendly and efficient, I fancied I’d take my sandwich and walk a little further into town where I could sit by the canal on the memorial bench and watch the barges go by. But it was the weirdest thing — the police were there and there were cones lined-up, I think to serve as a barrier, but I didn't fancy walking through them and be reprimanded, so I just assumed that’s what they were there for. I spoke to one of the policemen and at first he was reluctant to tell me what had happened, so I asked him the following:

— Was it a murder? He said no.

— Was it a suicide pact? He said no.

— Something to do with drugs? He said no.

— Not an animal attack I hope. He said no.

— Are we in any danger? He said no.

— There aren’t gangs here are there, or a crime syndicate of sorts? He said no.

He leaned in like we were friends, and I felt it too, and said to me softly that an old man’s cane had skidded over some moss causing him to trip and fall into the water, and by the time anyone noticed, he was dead. I stood next to the policeman for about ten more minutes and thought this would be a good place to eat my sandwich. And in a weird way, it was. I didn't say anything more to the policeman and he didn't say anything more to me, but I was eating my sandwich and he was drinking a styrofoam cup of coffee, it was some strange colour of orange and blue in the sky over the canal, and even though I could see a stretcher and a blanket which I suddenly realised was covering a dead body I also saw a heron, and you don't get to see those very often, so I felt lucky and I felt grateful. It was really nice.

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

5.

After a day of incredible pressure and its different pains, one after the other, follows at least one or two hours of what I can only describe as a kind of ritualistic stateliness; I’m currently working on my posture and self-restraint sitting upright in a computer chair, and whilst there are a good three or four inches between my back and the back of the chair, I’d say enough room for a cushion, I am not utilising a cushion, because I am working on myself, and if I can sit like this as if a cushion were really there, then I’ll have the grace and elegance of a dancer, and not only will I have the grace and elegance of a dancer, but I’ll have the restraint of a monk, and I will learn to find gratification in the simplest of ways, like once every 90 minutes when I feel gratified by just leaning back. In this spirit I’ve got a bottle of Riesling open, but I’m only drinking one glass per half an hour. There’s Mavrodaphne in the cupboard, but that’s more a me-and-Will drink, we’ve got a joke about it now, we even text about the Mavrodaphne. The last time he mentioned it I texted him back saying “Mavrodaph’ me” and he texted back that he laughed aloud, and I really think when someone takes the time to say “I actually laughed out loud” instead of “lol”, they truly must mean it. And there’s probably something in that, some profound key to understanding sincerity and humanity, but I’m not going to go into that now, not with the day I’ve had. No, I can leave that kind of heavy thinking for another day; that’s a Wednesday kind of a task. My first pain was planning a Monday lie-in yet waking up inexplicably at 8am after a missed call from a number I didn’t recognise that didn’t leave a text nor answer the phone when I called back but did in fact leave a voicemail though I can’t access those because it’s 2018 and leaving voicemails is disgusting. I don’t know if the cultural hatred of Mondays has become a superficial preset in all adult humans or if it really is as bad a day as we all think it is, because I don’t have a nine-to-five nor a structured work schedule and I hate Mondays, but the call waking me up and me just knowing I was waking up into a Monday prevented me from falling back asleep again. I try not to be superstitious so I’d be interested in learning the metric factors of how precisely one measures a “bad day”, why Monday is the worst. Why not Thursday? Tuesday’s a bum-note. I’ve never been hugely keen on Saturdays. I digress.

After my rude awakening I walked from my bedroom to the living room naked as the blinds were all shut and I’m a really naked person. There are low beams in my living room, these charming, great slabs of thick branch supporting the roof, and whilst they’re certainly characterful, I have to be aware of them all the time or else I’ll bang my head, like I did today, naked, gripping my head with my right hand, dropping my phone on the hard floor in doing so, not breaking the screen at all but there’s a scuff now in the corner that I can only challenge myself to stop thinking about. I tried calling Will a first time, and I got his voicemail: “Hi, this is Will, looks like I’m busy, if it’s an emergency call 999, they’ll be better qualified to deal with it than me”. Hilarious, Will, but I just banged my head on my roof beam and fell over like a naked Buster fucking Keaton, I have no time for your jokes and your japes right now. I tried a second time, then after my morning coffee a third, but still Hi this is Will, Hi this is Will, Hi this is Will. Eventually, as I was forcing myself to eat a bowl of muesli for the sake of health and also hating myself, he texted me: “Can’t talk now, Esther’s come over, had a fight with her mum or something, crying a lot, you know how she gets. Lemme give you a bell when I’m about. W. -X” And this had several flaws. Let’s start from the end and work our ways back. “W.-X” — why is he signing off like that, still, after four massive years of knowing me? Why does Will always have to end texts like he’s closing a deal? Just close me off with the initial and a kiss and — much worse — a full stop between the two? Distanced once more with that, let’s be honest, quite egregious dash? Is he proving some kind of point about being that crucial whole decade older than me, that self-righteous kind of, “oh look at me I love grammar” bollocks, that kind of “I don’t use Face-tube” or “I saw something on the interwebs” humour that the middle-aged employ to indicate superiority? Is that what that is? Because I’ve always wondered it and today I really had to think about it, and I figure it’s because he’s spending the day with Esther who’s always been that bit more Will’s brood, another late-30s horse-girl, another Oxon (that’s the name they give to people who graduated from Oxford and that’s something I have to fucking know), you know I think the only reason he married her in the first place is because it looked good on paper, he’s as good as told me that to be frank, and yeah maybe she is crying today and maybe she’s had a fight with her mum but that’s Will’s job how? Esther, sweetheart, darling, it’s over — and Will’s got the decree absolute to prove it, honey, sweetheart. And because of a fight with her mother? Everyone fights with their mother, I do nothing but fight with my mother but you don’t see me saying to Will “oh Will please can you come over and hold me? My mum still doesn’t love me and doesn’t even respect me”, do you? No you don’t, no matter how true that is, because Will’s not my dad. HE’S NOT YOUR DAD, ESTHER. 

And “can’t talk now”? Can’t, or won’t? Why would he write that like I’m placing some mad demand on him when I so very clearly am not? So many times we call each-other and there’s a dead end and it’s always something really innocuous that neither one of us feels the need to explain, we’re not married, and even if we were — the point is, he really felt like he had to say “can’t talk now”, like he’s really frazzled by me at 9am, and I even wonder if that’s for Esther’s benefit, like if she looks through his phone again she’ll see he’s at least been a little cold to me, and she’d love that wouldn’t she. Oh, but Esther’s sad again and so the world must spin off its axis because she’s sad again, Esther’s come off her Prozac, Esther’s cat’s got diabetes, Esther’s troubled by world news, Esther’s accidentally lost weight and now needs new clothes. I thought this whole Esther saga was over, I thought she'd get the hint that once you’ve put legal proceedings into action to separate yourself from someone, the message would hit home loud and clear, but no. Esther needs new brake-lights on her car. Esther’s tripped on an avocado skin and fallen down a haunted well. Esther’s been possessed by the great and powerful Beleth and needs a lift home from the exorcist’s bungalow. He’ll call me when he’s free, capital-double-you-dot-dash-capital-ex. And you’d think I’d get my sandwich and that would make me feel better? Well that's what I thought, too. Eventually I got dressed into the first t-shirt and jeans I saw lolling outside the clothes hamper and got out of my flat as quickly as I could, hoping to save the day before it fell into utter ruin and developed the ability to cause me real harm. The walk from my flat to the market is only a short one and is even shorter angry. I felt as if when I got through the door of the place I suddenly slipped outside of myself, but unable to look back in I instead disappeared, and when I returned back into my host body, I was looking at my reflection in the glass display of vanilla slices at my sandwich stall. I looked flushed. I looked hungry. I was ravenous and needed to see a friendly face. Of course today was the day they let just whoever walks into the market serve sandwiches, it seems, because I was met with a smiling boy-child, with biro scribbled onto his hands. He had mid-brown hair coming down about one inch above his shoulders, I’d say he was into day 10 of not washing it, the kind of bleary eyes that seem used to glasses and look unsettlingly beady when unframed, an unremarkable nose and an offensively weak chin, and whilst it sounds as if I’m describing a hapless teenager with great insensitivity you may in fact be relieved to learn my utter contempt here is directed toward a whole adult human who, if I were to conservatively guess, would be somewhere around the 27 years old marker. 27 years old and an untucked, short-sleeved, blue cotton dress shirt, like some bizarre attempt at formality, what was he, on his way to an interview for a different job or something? Judging by the outfit, a job as a white plastic patio furniture salesman? I wish I'd seen his shoes, they might have saved him, but as he stood, six foot tall before me, his bottom half was hidden behind the counter, so I had to assume he was wearing tan Caterpillar boots with striped yellow and black laces, and on that probably quite correct assumption, I hated him. He asked me my sandwich order and I told him, pretending to be shy to mask my escalating rage, and he threw the thing together like it just didn't matter, and when he asked me why he hadn't seen me round here before I don’t know how I found the strength to sweetly reply, “I just moved, yeah, used to live in Manchester but I’ve always fancied myself as a country mouse” with a smile, so convincingly he introduced himself as Greg and started suggesting local pubs to me, especially the Golden Lion because “you look cool, and they do a lot of cool nights there”. Cool, cool, cool, Greg, thanks for the tip, Greg. I asked him, “I come here every now and then for my lunch and haven't seen you before either?”, and he told me he's helping is mother out who’s at home in bed, sick. I told him that was really sweet of him and he crumpled in on himself slightly and said “nah”, as he limply placed the white, paper sandwich bag onto the counter, because I didn’t want him putting it directly into my hands and therefore did not offer my hands out. I waved goodbye after wrapping the conversation up with false platitudes, and thought again about the Caterpillar boots he might have been wearing, and thought about the beam in my living room, and thought about how many steps I would have to climb up to get back home and eat my sandwich. I made it to the top of my 39 stairs and into my flat without spontaneously combusting, and I sat behind my living room door with my knees up to my chest eating my sandwich which was, predictably, not that great. The onions this time were on the very top layer, the ham beneath those, then the lettuce underneath the ham, then the tomatoes, then the bread, like the whole thing was upside down. I thought about flipping the sandwich upside down to salvage this terrible situation into a bearable one but then the rounded-top half of the bun would be on the bottom, the flat half on the top, and I wasn't about to start creating my own problems. So I ate it, and it was fine. Which would be fine, but I’m not one to settle for fine. Today’s just been really hard. So here I'm sat with my Riesling and my good posture, looking at the long shadow my straight torso makes on the wall by the light of my reading lamp, and I just tried to call Will again, watching the shadow turn angular with my elbow’s movements like an old, German expressionist movie, but this time it went straight to voicemail and immediately I received a text saying: “Can I call you later?”. Will has turned his auto-reply on, and is no longer taking calls today. I’m breaking into the Mavrodaphne, and I'm going to apportion 14 cashew nuts for myself but first I will lean back for a good, long while. I won't call Will again. It’s really none of my business. My head just hurts from the knock from earlier, and I didn't like my sandwich at all, really. 

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

4.

I have entered into the spirit of Sunday with all the cosiness and propriety that a good, solid English day of rest demands. I am the living embodiment of a chunky-knit sweater cuffing over a rosy hand, wrapped around a mug of Grand Marnier and cocoa. My flat doesn’t benefit from any kind of log fire, but the heating is on full-whack, and as I sit under my generations-old goose-feather duvet, I am on-and-off talking with Will over Skype, who has kindly set his laptop by his own fireplace for effect, and who is dipping in and out of his work to share idle thoughts with me. We are both watching the same television channel, and the 1988 Tom Hanks film Big started no longer than twenty minutes ago on our respective televisions. 
I got my chores done early today because even though I didn’t sleep while about 3am, I woke up feeling motivated at 7:30am and after loitering outside of the market between 8:15am and 8:45am (because I was hardly going to go home and go back out again, not in this cold weather, not with my stairs), the shutters thuddered open and I was lucky enough to be my favourite sandwich stall’s first patron of the day. It was the first woman, the old girl with the chubby fingers who served me today — a very, very welcome return. I feel a presence of comfort when I’m around her and I know that now. In terms of making my sandwich, what she lacks in speed she makes up for in sheer, gutsy force, I see her press that sandwich bun down letting not one sliver of onion or meat escape, with all the strength and will of a kind of  activist-antagonist political agitator, purposeful and straight-backed at the helm of a printing-press, emblazoning multiples of white t-shirts with some blood-red symbol of unrest and resistance. The sandwich has been sat on the kitchen counter (still in its bag) now, an invitingly reliable treat as my reward for tidying the flat, sweeping the floors, washing my bedlinen and taking out the recycling. It was originally in the fridge, but I took it out to rest. Soon, I will eat it. Not immediately, but soon.

It really is a crying shame that Hanks lost out on the Academy Award for this picture, though Dustin Hoffman’s Rain Man is, admittedly, something of a tour de force. A slightly quieter year and Hanks would’ve scooped it up, I’m quite sure of it. I’m not sure Hanks minds though, he won for Philadelphia, and later for Forrest Gump and I’m quite sure Big even won a Golden Globe in the Hollywood melée, so I’m quite sure he can really look back on his achievements and be very proud of all that he’s accomplished, counting Big amongst those of his greater performances — I know I would. Why does Joshua Baskin’s mother never really chase up her son’s disappearance? Will just told me he once saw a boy at his school lay dead on the gym floor, he’d collapsed after rugby and just never got up again. He said they were only sort of close, sat near each-other in a couple of lessons, but that it’s a thought he returns to every so often. That’s something about Will I never knew. Ever since he became a father he’s grown quite maudlin, I wonder if something about creating life gives you a bolt of mortality, that you think about death every day until the fact? Did Will one day wake up grown? Will that happen to me, too? 

It’s started to rain outside in true cinematic fashion and Will just said he’d never marry the same person twice. I hear him clacking away furiously at his keyboard, and every so often he says, “oh for fuck’s sake” (or words to that effect). This is the pivotal scene of the film Big — the uptight, corporate woman with the quite excellent hair is jumping up and down on Joshua Baskin’s fantastic trampoline without a care in the world, all her worries have fallen off her shoulders and she looks visibly lighter and completely at ease. Will’s dog, Wolfhound, just obscured my view of the fireplace, flopping himself down on the rug he’s seldom allowed on, only when he’s ill. Will immediately broke out of his reverie of research and typing to call out, “I too would love to sit by the fire and do fuck all, Wolfhound, but life’s cruel”. Joke’s on you Will. You really can sit by the fire and do fuck all, we all could, but you’re bound by your imaginary deadlines again aren’t you, darling. I said to Will, would you mind if I ate my sandwich on cam? 
 Will said, you don’t need my permission to eat. 
 I know that, dickhead, I said, but you’re not eating and I am, it’s that’s impolite, isn’t it. 
 Will said just eat your sandwich and I said, have I told you about this sandwich? Have you heard of it? 
 Will’s flapping about like he’s about to lay an egg, I’ve never seen somebody who works so little and has such a charmed, pampered life, be so inexplicably stressed as Will gets when he begins to fuss through piles of disorganised papers, opening and shutting his desk drawers as if he’s surviving a cruel curse that makes his memory of their contents erase itself as soon as the drawer is closed again. 
He said sorry, have I heard of what? 
Have you heard of this sandwich? I asked. Have I told you about it? It’s ham salad. 
I've heard of a ham salad sandwich, yes, said Will. 
 No, I said. Have you heard of mine? Have I told you about my sandwich?

 Will exhales with this really exasperated grunt sometimes, a deflating sigh of near-defeat, and now's one of those times. He does it when he’s really up against it: dealing with his ex-wife, dealing with the mother of his small daughter, dealing with his vegan sister-in-law, and now, but never before today, dealing with me. Joshua Baskin has taken the top bunk of the bed whilst the uptight, corporate woman with the truly fantastic hair is settling herself into the bottom bunk, wondering — I’ll bet — if she’s accidentally gone home with a serial killer. He’s handed her a glow-in-the-dark compass ring, and Will just said to me, after I asked him one more time: “nobody’s talking about your sandwich” and laughed. 
 “But would you just look at this fucker?” I said to him, putting the thing up close to my webcam so he could see each layer, and the thickness of the ham. There’s a part of me that wants him to be proud because of his dad being a butcher and him therefore being something of an authority on what good ham should look like. 
“It looks pretty good” he said and I felt all snug and sweet with this affectionate approval. I told him he doesn’t know the half of it, and bit into it triumphantly in such a way that it caused Will to laugh warmly enough that he decided to put his work to bed for the day and watch the film with me. 
 “Do you think by the end of the film she truly asks herself if she’s a paedophile now?” asked Will. 
 “This film is so full of plot holes” I said. “I love it”.

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

3.

I do believe the liminal, hungover state is the closest thing to time travel humans might ever know. After writing yesterday afternoon I still felt utterly exhausted so shut my eyes for a further half an hour and before I knew it, it was 6pm again and though only a short time had passed, I woke up in a new dimension, thrust rudely into that strange no-man’s-land of late afternoon fading into early evening where there’s nothing important to be said or done, friends are still at work or making their slow way home, the air that hangs itself in the sky adopts a peculiar storm-grey hue whatever the weather and becomes forebodingly morose with its lack of definition — the day’s run out but the night’s not yet started — in those hours I find me at my most inert, and I don’t like that. About 90% of the time, I don’t like that. If I’d been awake, I’d have been able to turn the temperature up on that uncanny, dismal feeling gradually and not noticed how it crept into me, instead of sleeping through the adjustment period and waking up in the hot bath with not much to do, not much to say. I put on the television but there’s nothing on around that time. I’ve taken to watching those primetime sitcoms from America they re-run in those hours, a perfect marriage of activity and time. There’s nothing funny about those programmes, but there’s nothing offensive about them either. Or is there? There’s the rub, nobody cares, it’s 6pm, nothing matters. In my flat the internet seems to dip at around this time, something I didn’t think was still possible these days but there’s a definite uneven bandwidth dispersal that works against my favour in the hours I need it the most. Between 5:30pm and 8:50pm every day, I can barely complete a single task. The music and films I have downloading suddenly pause themselves without permission. Requests to log into my social media time out as if bored with themselves. I can get onto pornography websites but the thumbnails that describe the short movie I’m potentially interested in drag on slowly or barely load at all, perhaps to teach me a lesson, not about pornography but about whatever thing it is in me that also cannot attend a restaurant without researching the menu online first. I can access instant messaging services but they’re not functional — I can see the names of my friends and their statuses (active/busy/away/offline) but my messages get lost in the thickness. 
 A phone call broke the tedium and saved me from nearly crying through the unfamiliarity to pass the time. Will thought it might be pertinent to tell me a musician friend of his from his teenage years was performing some deeply ironic, wonderfully nostalgic war-time knees-up down at the Bear Brewery, just a couple of miles from me which — in country miles — is just a hop, skip and a jump away. Suddenly I was opened up to a world of possibilities with regard to how my night would end up. I met him there; when I walked in the door of this small, dank, gaudy fuchsia painted cubby-hole of a pub, I initially stood alone, a long cape around me, but before any anxiety could set in about how quickly I could blend myself into the surroundings with what I now see was an ill-thought out choice of outfit, I felt two great arms crowd my shoulders and firmly press me, I turned my head around and several inches upward was Will’s happy face. I shall miss this, when events conspire. 
Bear Brewery is a place where you pay for your beer with tickets. You go in, predict roughly how much you’ll be drinking and pay for tickets that correspond to that price — Will and I both came in hot with £20 each, which I said to him would be enough because as I was getting ready and before we came out, I gathered enough patience to look the place up on TripAdvisor and find its Facebook page despite it being the internet’s sleepy hours, and learned that £20 will give you 10 tickets that follow a loose tariff of: dark ales and stouts are one ticket; IPAs, scrumpies and perries and singlets of wine are two tickets; carafes of wine a three tickets. I explained the pricing system to Will and told him I’d been before. 
What’s the word for being sentimental about a time that you have never lived through, that nobody you know has ever lived through, a time you have no real, concrete understanding of? Because when Will’s friend and his co-musician hoisted themselves up on their bar-stools in era-appropriate attire (grandad-collar shirts, cardigan vests, loose cuffs rolled to the elbow and round lens glasses) and played their banjos and sang Run, Rabbit, Run I felt wrapped up in the spirit of the blitz, and when they broke into I’ll Be Seeing You and finally The White Cliffs of Dover, I felt moved to almost tears. They served piping hot, buttery, black peas, doused in malt vinegar and hot with pepper. I ate them from the styrofoam cup and felt in some way as if I’d eaten them before. I’d read earlier on in the evening that served this way, they’re called “parched peas”, and I like that a lot. Of course it didn’t stop there, and after the performance Will re-introduced himself to his old friend and what came next was the comforting routine of cabbing into the old town. I could feel the dark ales and tart pear ciders swishing about in my stomach so for the rest of the night, I only drank shorts. 

 Today I floated on to the indoor market to see what else we have to offer in the town. It’s a strange one — my sandwich place is one of three sandwich places in the same cluster in the same cell in the same indoor market, all selling a similar roster of foods. Whilst my place sells vanilla slices, the place almost directly opposite calls them Bavarian slices and the Crème Pâtissière looked altogether lighter, whipped even, so I fancied I’d get one of those for lunch instead. I was loitering around that stall for a long time but nobody seemed to come. I kept looking at this Bavarian slice all lined up with the others, then over to the cash register where nobody stood, back and forth between the two, changing my mind once or twice about which slice I was going to ask for before eventually giving up after perhaps twenty or so minutes. By the time I got to my sandwich place I asked if I could have a vanilla slice, and because this was a thing I hadn’t asked for before I suppose I seemed quite shy, but the girl from yesterday (acrylic nails seem to be hanging on by a thread at this point and closer up I despaired at the state of her cuticles) told me they were all out. I was left in a state of momentary panic so I reverted back to a default she and I were already familiar with and got my sandwich — ham salad, no cucumber, on a white oven bottom, and please no sauce. I don’t know how many of those she puts together in a day, that precise order, but the sandwich seemed to be artfully constructed in record time, I was impressed to say the least, and as I felt the weight of the thing in its white paper bag fall into my hands, I had to smile to myself, really. I ate it outside on the bench as the sun made a brief appearance today and as I took the first bite I got a little piece of everything, and I thought, “well, it’s you and me now” to the sandwich, though I did not say it out aloud.

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

2.

My prediction that last night would be a heavy one was entirely accurate. At first I thought I may come to a loose end; Hugo’s just started a new job, Rob is going through yet another rough patch with Kat (it never ends with those two — this time I believe the catalyst was a slightly below-par paint-job in the downstairs bathroom, he should’ve got a man in, she should’ve been clearer about that) and whilst Will never lets me down there’s potential for awkwardness happening whenever it’s just him and me left to drain The Staff Of Life of its gin of the week alone (rhubarb and ginger, quite passable going down and somehow nostalgic of Christmases of old on the way back up). But the boys all came through. 
 Started out at the peculiar old Thai place in town, walls all adorned with appropriative emblems to please this overwhelmingly white and increasingly gentrified old town with tokens of Something Eastern to bring about a cosy authenticity that makes the food taste better to a perennially bland collective tongue; in amongst the muss of Thai film posters set to a backdrop of fading, po-faced flock, I spied a framed Japanese flag, what seemed to be a Mongolian warrior shield hung over its feature window, and of course the ubiquitous gold waving Chinese cats perched on the tables, the tiny shelves in the corner, by the mints and stack of laminate menus on the way out. 
Hugo started with sticky wings and moved onto a rendang. They didn’t have beef so he had to settle with chicken, worst luck. Rob, lacking in imagination as ever, had spring rolls and then chilli pork with boiled rice. Will and I, after umm-ing and aah-ing for no longer than twenty minutes, agreed to share our starters of butterfly prawn and squid tempura together, and whilst he went on with jungle curry (a braver soul than I), I followed on nicely with a tofu massaman, springy and wet, and soft, little potatoes like fondants in their sweet broth. A few rounds of Kingfishers is normally how it goes, we all end the meal under this pretence of civility by ordering digestifs apiece; Hugo’s brandy, Rob’s limoncello (at a Thai place? Really, Rob?), Will’s single malt and for me a double Benedictine. I was offered sake but it felt wrong somehow.
 After that we repaired to the White Hart up the road where we know they sell the good ale, a rich, hazelnut effort, 6.2% a pint, we knocked them back. That’s when we all start really talking, if we’re lucky — and we were — we get the table by the log stove, and in so stately an atmosphere, it’s impossible to not swap stories, top one another’s exuberances to excess with sickly brown shorts of all varieties, degrading into tequila slammers, one right after the other, all in this whirl of conversation that dissolves into tawdriness as it goes on and goes on; I know now that Kat doesn’t come any more, I know Rob masturbates thinking of his sister-in-law, I know Will and Kitty aren’t happy because I know Will likes things he couldn’t bring to Kitty’s table, no surprises there. By the end of it we were all in love, you know how it is. Cuddles and singing and what have you, a cab to and from the Staff for a few last-ones, and it was Will who took me back again, back home for the wines I’d picked. 
I don’t remember much of that but I remember that smoking so many roll-ups without filters wasn’t the coolest thing I’ve ever done. The Mavrodaphne was a hit and I learned that there’s no class discrimination when it comes to cheap, greek wine. I asked Will if he could get hold of perhaps some MDMA or coke for the next one, he said sure, but to top this one we ended the night two valium each, I went asleep toasted, I woke up and he’d taken off to work, spare blanket was folded neatly on my couch just like he used to fold his trousers, socks, t-shirt vest and boxers in a neat pile on the ottoman the night before wearing them. Honestly I’m just so glad we’re in this friendly place now, after all of it, the whole thing.
 When I went to the market again today I did so half-drunk at 10am. I thought today was Saturday and I hear there’s a Mexican street-food guy comes every second Saturday of the month but it’s now the second Friday, so the only hungover food I could get was my sandwich. 
It was a different girl this time, a wispy one, I reckon she was 16 or so and probably thinks this is a good way to earn a little bit of extra money, I bet she’s that friend at school who never shuts up about having a job, about responsibility and work ethic, as if the most interesting part of who she is, is tied up in the hairnet of her sandwich-making role. I asked for the same again, a ham salad on white, no sauce, hold the cucumber, and did so pretending to be shy again this time so she couldn’t smell all the booze on my breath. I was concerned that someone of such a small frame would have trouble pressing the sandwich down because I feel that’s an important part of it, making sure no filling will topple out especially as I don’t take mayonnaise or salad cream or anything else that would normally serve to bind everything together, but she seemed pretty farm-strong also, although I worry for her nails, be they gel or acrylic, I feared of one pinging off and finding its way into the dough of an uncut granary. 
I may come to love the thud of the paper-bagged sandwich falling into my two hands cupped together like a begging bowl, because all the way home and all the way up my 39 stairs and two landings, throughout the sweet and stale sweat-haze of my booze cloud following me through my front door, I looked forward to my sandwich. I ate the whole thing in under three minutes and passed out on the futon and slept for four hours and just woke up now to write this. Delicious.

[thesamesandwicheveryday]

1.

There’s something incredibly comforting about living in the valley of somewhere. Everywhere I look are towering, sweeping moors, imposing over this small town that feels like it’s been etched into the stone of the grand crags, like nothing was ever built from the ground up but chipped at relentlessly by hailstone and just as an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters would invariably write Shakespeare’s great works, we’re the deeply improbable town that was accidentally made entirely by bad weather. We get power cuts sometimes, but I’m completely fine with it, it feels a lot like — of course we get power cuts, we’re all living in the past, this is surely what we signed up for. During the rainy season (which is apparently right now), severe weather alerts are announced via an old air raid siren they’ve got leftover from the second world war; 11pm and off it goes, groaning and swelling and moaning back down its macabre glissando, and honestly, I’m fond of it. The stone-bricked buildings are still black with soot from whatever event it was that brought soot to the wind that passed through this town, however long ago. 
I took a stroll into the covered market today for want of getting out of the new flat and stretching my legs a bit, my calves have been aching a little recently and whenever that happens I have this image of some gnarly old woman in my head, hairs on her upper lip, saying: “you’re dehydrated”, like someone else’s grandma, powdery and beige, one thin gold chain restful on the rivets of a wrinkled, old neck. With her in my mind’s eye I bought a tin of fizzy blood orange from the Sicilian man who also sells fresh olives, feta cheese, focaccia, beetroot-coloured pastas, tins of something called “Giant Beans”; a portly older gentleman who has visibly lived through a stroke at some point, though I’d never be so improper to ask. I wanted to give him the, “I just moved in!” introduction but he seemed pressed in some way, maybe because I spent a good few minutes browsing and only came away with one tin of pop for 55p, paid with a 50 pence piece and a 20 pence piece and panic-blurted “keep the change” as if I have the authority to go throwing coin at market vendors like I’m doing them a favour. Maybe he thought I thought he needed 15p, it was an unintentionally sour move, I wasn’t thinking, so I just bolted. I’ll make conversation with him another time, plead my case as a welcome new addition to the locale. Maybe I’ll read a little about Sicily and its culinary vernacular, buy those giant beans and confidently tell him, with a warm and friendly smile, which Provençal casserole they’ll end up in, beautifully pronounce the name of it.
 Across from him to where I spun round and marched toward with false purpose just to get away — exactly what I’d been looking for. A stall that only sells sandwiches, pork pies, vanilla slices and cooked rotisserie chicken. I didn’t look up or engage this time leaving no room for another faux-pas to arrive, and just quietly asked for a sandwich, pretending to be shy. Just a regular ham salad, the litmus test of a sandwich bar’s integrity, hold the cucumber. What I got was thudding mass of dough and meat plodded into my hands, unseen from inside a white paper bag; this great, hulking, doorstop oven-bottom, but with onion. Who’d have known? Honest-to-god; thin sliced white onion, just thrown in there with the lettuce and tomato like it had business being there. I didn’t want to say anything because I’m new in town and being someone with the rival county’s accent and city-clothes it’s probably not my place to start saying how things should be and after the event just moments before I was done for the day. I just glimpsed her constructing the thing in my periphery when I was pretending to look at my phone, pat them down between the tomato (huge slices, where are these massive tomatoes coming from?) and the lettuce before pressing the whole thing down with all of her upper-body strength, paid my £1.65 and left. My flat, whilst beautiful, is on the third floor with only stairs, so by the time I got home I was starving and sweating, so I ripped into this thing at my ugliest, and — look, I don’t know if it was the bread they make themselves or the cut ham that came from the butcher in the same covered market or even the erroneous onion, but this was the best sandwich I ever ate: unpretentious; honest. Just a ham salad sandwich, no big deal, locally sourced, and squashed down by a farm-strong girl with a yellow-gold ring on every single one of her fingers (no diamonds or solitaires otherwise). 
Later on I walked the two miles out to the nearest supermarket, and bought one bottle of Montepulciano D’Abruzzo, and one bottle of Mavrodaphne of Patras, I’ve sent texts out to the boys, and if we come back here for a nightcap after a big one I’ve got the Monte’ to prove that I understand what September means for wine, and the Mavro’ because it tastes exactly like syrup, looks like old blood and — at £4.95 and 17% proof  — proves itself.