Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar

by Alexei Sayle

  ALEXEI SAYLE’S

  IMAGINARY

  SANDWICH

  BAR

  To Linda

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  NON-FICTION

  Stalin Ate My Homework

  Thatcher Stole My Trousers

  FICTION

  Barcelona Plates

  The Dog Catcher

  Overtaken

  The Weeping Women Hotel

  Mister Roberts

  CONTENTS

  By the Same Author

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  A Note on the Author

  Also available by Alexei Sayle

  Chapter One

  BAKED POTATOES

  Welcome, what can I get you? This sandwich bar that I own and run is clearly imaginary but that is not to say that it doesn’t exist, it just exists in a place that is imaginary. You may think this is just comedy bollocks, but there are some modern philosophers who consider that what we think of as the ‘actual world’ is only one of many distinct possible worlds, so a world where I really do own a sandwich bar is a distinct possible world (though I imagine hygiene standards are a lot lower in that world).

  The idea of possible worlds is most commonly attributed to seventeenth-century philosopher and polymath Gottfried Leibniz, who spoke of possible worlds as ideas in the mind of God and used the notion to argue that our actually created world must be ‘the best of all possible worlds’. Arthur Schopenhauer argued that, on the contrary, our world must be the worst of all possible worlds, because if it were only a little worse it could not continue to exist. So if you feel your life couldn’t get any worse, blame Arthur Schopenhauer.

  In the 1960s American philosopher David Lewis went much further and maintained that ‘possible worlds’ are multiple, really existing worlds, which are simply beyond the one we live in. Lewis argued that these worlds exist just as unequivocally as our actual world, but are distinguished from it simply by standing in no spatial, temporal or causal relation to it. According to Lewis, the only ‘special’ property that our world has is that we exist in it. You won’t get this in any other Christmas book.

  1968, A YEAR THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING EVERYWHERE APART FROM IN SOME BITS OF LEEDS

  I have been telling people I run a sandwich bar since the mid-1970s. Sometimes my delivery would make it clear that I was joking but on other occasions I would present it as a fact. Pretending to run a sandwich bar combined two of my favourite things, which are pretending and places that sell sandwiches.

  It can be difficult to pinpoint exactly when something happened that created an obsession in you or forged a personality trait. The precise moment when Picasso turned to Cubism or Simon Cowell became a bastard are not recorded, but I can tell you exactly when I fell in love with establishments dedicated exclusively to the sale of edible stuff between slices of bread. It was 1968, Holborn in central London, and I was sixteen years old, visiting friends who were appearing in a National Youth Theatre production at a nearby venue. It seems such a long time ago now but it’s hard to describe how terrible food was in those days.

  These days my home town, Liverpool, is full of great boutique hotels and smart, innovative restaurants, but back when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, the city had a more negative and complex relationship with food. At school a lot of kids were ‘fussy eaters’: one wouldn’t eat peas, another would only eat metal, another wouldn’t eat at all unless the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church was present. I remember the local ITV station, Granada, doing vox pops, going round Liverpool city centre in the early 1970s asking people what the worst thing was they had ever eaten and one woman said, ‘Fish. Fricking fish . . . it’s fricking disgusting.’

  And as far as eating out went, it was a culinary desert, Liverpool. In the late 1970s me and my wife Linda were having a meal in a Greek restaurant on Hardiman Street in Liverpool and we ordered the meze, the hummus and the taramasalata and the tzatziki, and after a couple of minutes the Scouse waitress came back and she said, ‘We’ve run out of pitta, do you want Hovis? Because that’s a delicious taste of the Peloponnese, isn’t it, Hovis?’

  So British food in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was terrible in every way, like it’s hard now to understand how a salad could be racist! And you had all these homophobic pies. I always resist nostalgia; I think it’s a very corrosive emotion, nostalgia; people who lived a hundred years ago were never nostalgic, which is why their lives were perfect in every possible way . . . summers were ten years long and there were dragons and the King of the North was Jon . . . no, hang on, that’s Game of Thrones . . . There’s a conviction amongst older people that the past was better than the present but I just think the same terrible things that happen now happened then, they just never told you about it! Like in the 1950s the TV news was sixty seconds long and it was presented by one of the Black and White Minstrels.

  It’s a fact not well known now but rationing went on long, long after the war ended. In fact, I think truth and honesty are still being rationed by the government yark! yark! I mean, from 1939 to 1945 the government had permitted, indeed had positively encouraged men to bayonet people in the guts or set them on fire with flame throwers or bomb their houses from 20,000 feet, but when they came home they couldn’t have a tomato until 1957! Till the 1950s all milk production, apart from what was bottled, went to make something called ‘government cheese’. Imagine that? Cheese that tasted like Michael Gove.

  Working-class families such as ours did not eat out frequently but, when we did, we would do so at the Bon Marché department store or Henderson’s, which we thought of as Liverpool’s version of Harrods, except Harrods didn’t have a department dedicated entirely to the sale of potatoes. When you ate out in the 1950s and 1960s there was a tremendous lack of generosity in both the service and the cuisine. The staff would grudgingly dole out tiny portions of food as if us diners were survivors of a shipwreck who were now crammed into a lifeboat under the baking sun with rescue not expected to arrive for weeks. You always had the feeling that if you tried to get more than your meagre rations the head waiter was going to shoot you with a revolver.

  So that was my experience of eating out when in Holborn I came across this amazing place, a sandwich bar that I can remember vividly to this very day. It was on a corner and the large plate-glass window was stacked high with bread rolls studded with caraway seeds. I was reminded of Miranda’s words in The Tempest: ‘Oh brave new world . . . that has such bread rolls in ’t!’ I went inside and saw the fillings, such fillings. I mean, what kind of a deranged genius would thing of mixing bacon with avocado! There was ‘Minty Lamb’, ‘Tuna Mexicaine’ and ‘Egg’. There was a generosity about it and a lack of formality; no snooty head waiter; you could eat your sandwiches there or you could take them away. I just fell in love with the whole idea of sandwich bars.

  ‘Oh brave new world . . . that has such bread rolls in ’t!’

  IMITATING CHRISTINE WALKER

  In 1976 my friend Glen decided to give up advertising to spend a year teaching English in the Sudan. On his return he was supposed to be staying with his brother but they had a row at Heathrow Airport a few minutes after his plane had landed and so Glen phoned and asked if he and his new New Zealander girlfriend Virginia could stop for a short while in our spare room in the council tower block where we lived. When they arrived from the airport dragging several huge, overstuffed suitcases behind them, Glen and Virginia were both painfully thin and their skin was a bright orange hue due to a tropical parasite they had picked up. Both of them spent their first few days back in London in our lavatory, terrible noises iss
uing from the interior. Me and my wife Linda were so worried about catching the same parasite that we used a toilet in a pub, a bus ride away over the river in Wandsworth.

  As the weeks of their stay lengthened, the couple hardly ever went out but remained in the flat all day, arguing with each other and smoking continuously. After a while me and Linda had had enough and we asked Glen and Virginia to move out, but rather than being honest we told them untruthfully that our old friend Christine Walker was coming to stay with us indefinitely and she would be needing the room.

  Reluctantly the emaciated couple agreed to move out but asked if they could leave their suitcases behind, since the only place they could find to rent was a tiny bedsit with no storage space. We said yes but this presented us with a problem – one or other of them would be regularly returning to pick stuff up from a room in which Chris Walker was supposedly staying. I therefore felt I had to fake Chris’s day-to-day presence.

  First of all I got some old shoes of Linda’s and scattered them around then threw some clothes about in a similar fashion. Next I placed a book by the bedside, open about halfway through, and beside it a glass of water. When I stood back and surveyed all this it looked incredibly false. Nobody, I thought, would believe that a real person was spending time in this room. There was a need for more detail. Feeling rather strange I put some of Linda’s lipstick on, then took a sip of water to leave the imprint around the edge of the glass. That felt better. Finally I took all my clothes off, then I sprayed some old perfume Linda never used over my body, then I got into the bed and rolled around to give it that rumpled look.

  Every time Glen or Virginia came back to get something from their cases I would have to make alterations. Turning the pages of Imaginary Chris’s bedtime reading, buying her new clothes from the Oxfam shop to scatter around and leaving a pack of Tampax open once a month, though I was unsure how many of these things women got through each month: two boxes? Five?

  Yet I still felt as though there was something lacking from my creation of Imaginary Chris’s life, some kind of authenticity. So then I wondered if I shouldn’t give her more of a backstory, sort of like when actors in a film create a whole life for the characters they play, even though none of that life is apparent to the audience seeing the film.

  So why was she in London? I asked. Who was she friends with? Well in my mind somebody as free and adventurous as Imaginary Chris would have plenty of friends and, I thought, lovers too. I imagined she was having an affair with a married guy from the television company where she worked but Imaginary Chris being the kind of woman she was, would also in the past have slept with women as well as men; you couldn’t tie Imaginary Chris down. (Except sometimes Imaginary Chris did like being tied down but only by another woman.) I would have left napkins from lesbian bars lying around if I’d known where any were but instead I wrote a couple of passionate notes in what I hoped was disguised handwriting signing them ‘Vicky’ and detailing what Vicky would like Imaginary Chris to do to her. These I put in a drawer where Glen or Virginia would never see them but I felt it lent an air of authenticity.

  When the couple finally got a bigger place and they came and took their cases away, Imaginary Chris was suddenly no longer necessary. Despite my protests, Linda insisted that I clear the spare room of Chris’s things, which made me sad because I missed her terribly, plus there was a definite feeling that there’d been some kind of spark between the two of us.

  INSIDER GOSSIP

  This book is obviously based on the Radio 4 show of the same name. I like to think of Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar as exactly the type of radio programme that the abbreviation ‘WTF’ was invented for. And here I’ll let you into a little trade secret. If you’ve ever been to a radio or TV recording you will know that, at the start, before the recording begins, the producer comes out and makes a little speech and gets the audience to practise laughing and clapping several times. At my show we do things differently. My producer comes out and asks the audience to be as lethargic and uninterested as possible then he tells them a long story about his cat’s kidney stone operation but still they laugh! Ha ha ha!

  BOILED ONION

  Because I am a celebrity I also have a lot of celebrity customers at my imaginary sandwich bar. One is Neil Kinnock, once leader of the Labour Party and vice-president of the European Commission, ex-chair of the British Council and former president of Cardiff University, who, when he’s attending the House of Lords, comes in for his regular falafel wrap with extra beef gravy and a boiled onion. He’s a right bastard, he is, I hate him! I wish I didn’t have to serve him and smile so politely, all the time bowing and scraping and saying, ‘Yes, sir, no, sir,’ and calling him ‘mate’. One of these days I’ll kill him, so help me I will.

  One of my favourite characters in fiction is Pirate Jenny from Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera. Jenny is a waitress at a ‘crummy old hotel’, who fantasises that she is in fact a notorious pirate. One morning a pirate ship – with eight sails and fifty guns loaded – sails into the harbour. The pirates come ashore, clap all the townspeople in irons and drag them to Jenny, where they ask, ‘Which ones shall we kill?’ and she says, ‘Hoopla! All of them.’ Then she sails away with the pirates. That’s how everybody who works in a sandwich bar feels all the time.

  NEWS FROM SOMEWHERE

  Later I was to learn that sandwiches are not just delicious to eat, they can also tell us a lot about history. Their very name, for instance, shows us a lot about the rapaciousness of the British aristocracy: how they appropriate and steal everything they come across. There’s this myth that the sandwich was invented by the Earl of Sandwich who was too busy to get up from the card table and instead told his cook to prepare him some meat between two slices of bread. Do you think the Earl of Sandwich was the first person to think of putting a bit of meat between two slices of bread? Hell no! But he’s all, ‘I invented da . . .’ By the way, all aristocrats back then spoke in thick Scouse accents. If you visited the royal palace or the Admiralty in the eighteenth century, it would have sounded like a pub in the Merseyside satellite town of Huyton. Therefore it is best if you imagine the Earl of Sandwich’s words being spoken by Len McCluskey, General Secretary of Unite the Union, or the actor Ricky Tomlinson. He’d say, ‘I’m the fucking Earl of Sandwich, me, and I invented the sandwich and I’m also the Duke of Catflap ’cos I thought of them too. And you can also call me the Marquis of Hovercraft. I invented the hovercraft after I saw one operating a regular service between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight. ’Cos I’m the fucking Marquis of Hovercraft and the Earl of Sandwich, me. Before I invented the sandwich, if people wanted a snack they’d have to eat a football squeezed between two bricks or a dog served between two other bigger dogs or a bowl of muesli, because I’m the Earl of Sandwich!’

  Apart from being delicious to eat sandwiches and sandwich fillings can also teach us a lot about history; for example, there is Coronation Chicken. This sandwich filling is named in commemoration of the events of 1878 when following a misprint in the Almanach de Gotha after the death of the King of Prussia, a chicken was crowned as his replacement. That chicken ruled over one of the longest periods of peace and prosperity in northern Europe.

  Then there’s the Prawn Cocktail. This filling originated in the United States during the era known as Prohibition. At that time the only way to get around the ban on the consumption and sale of alcohol was to disguise your drink as a three-course meal. Hence the development of the Prawn Cocktail (and its less successful siblings, the Beef Martini, the Whitebait Spritzer and the Pork and Soda).

  And, finally, Lamb Tikka. The name comes from the period in India during partition when Hindu and Muslim separatists would put alarm-clock-timed bombs inside sheep then drive them into busy marketplaces. ‘Lamb Tikka’ was often the last thing some poor shopper said before the bomb exploded.

  That chicken ruled over one of the longest periods of peace and prosperity in Europe

  A LIFE OF PRETENDING
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br />   But it wasn’t until the mid 1970s I think that I began actually pretending to run a sandwich bar. Sometimes I was honest with people and told them it didn’t exist; on other occasions I was less forthright. I remember one weekend in 1976, me and Linda went to the Odeon in Leicester Square to see the newly released Sylvester Stallone movie Rocky. Before the lights went down, I noticed in the audience a few rows behind me a mournful-looking, slightly pop-eyed, balding man with a droopy moustache. I whispered to Linda, ‘You see that man in the fifth row? I think it’s Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze militia from the Chouf Mountains of the Lebanon.’

  ‘You’re always saying that,’ she replied.

  ‘Yes,’ I hissed, ‘but this time I’m certain.’ The Druze sect were much in the news because they were one of the factions fighting in the Lebanese Civil War.

  After the film finished I approached the man with the moustache and said to him, ‘Excuse me, are you Walid Jumblatt, leader of the Druze militia from the Chouf Mountains of the Lebanon?’

  ‘Yes I am,’ he said.

  ‘What did you think of the film, then?’ I asked after a pause.

  ‘It was all right,’ he replied.

  After I got back to Linda she said, ‘Did you tell him about your sandwich bar?’

  ‘Yes, I told him that all races and religions mixed in my sandwich bar without any tension and I wondered if he’d ever thought that the problems in the Middle East might be solved by the installation of a help-yourself salad bar; people never seemed angry when they were going back for a second helping at a salad bar.’

  ‘What did he say to that?’

  ‘He said it seemed a bit simplistic.’

  Why did I do it? The pleasure of pretending, I suppose. But what is the impulse to pretend to do something like running a sandwich bar? Well, I personally think, if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth pretending to do it. Which is not to say that it doesn’t require skill and dedication. Like in 1999 I had a role in a British movie called Swing, which starred Lisa Stansfield who’d been around the world but she couldn’t find her baby (which is really a matter for social services). My part was as the trumpeter of the swing band that she was in. Now I can’t play the trumpet, but in the film I acted as if I could. I pretended to play the trumpet and I really really enjoyed pretending to play the trumpet so much and I was good at it too! Sometimes I’d pretend to play the trumpet when the cameras weren’t rolling; me and the other actors who also couldn’t play their instruments would jam. Now it obviously wasn’t as hard as actually playing the trumpet, but there was a certain skill required, I spent minutes practising and I really wished there was a place to go, a club or something where people could come along to watch me pretending to play the trumpet. Maybe if it only cost £1 to get in and there were, like, free T-shirts they might come.