Alexei Sayle - Alexei Sayle’s Imaginary Sandwich Bar

ALEXEI SAYLES
IMAGINARY
SANDWICH
BAR

To Linda

NON-FICTION

Stalin Ate My Homework

Thatcher Stole My Trousers

FICTION

Barcelona Plates

The Dog Catcher

Overtaken

The Weeping Women Hotel

Mister Roberts

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 doesnt 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 couldnt 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 wont 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 its 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 wouldnt eat peas, another would only eat metal, another wouldnt 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... its 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, Weve run out of pitta, do you want Hovis? Because thats a delicious taste of the Peloponnese, isnt it, Hovis?

So British food in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s was terrible in every way, like its hard now to understand how a salad could be racist! And you had all these homophobic pies. I always resist nostalgia; I think its 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, thats Game of Thrones... Theres 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.

Its 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 couldnt 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 March department store or Hendersons, which we thought of as Liverpools version of Harrods, except Harrods didnt 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 Mirandas 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 issuing 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.