Ring Road (43 page)

Because you have a beard?

No. Because I need to write about things that other people are unembarrassed to talk about. Maybe that's it. That could be one explanation of what I'm doing.

Well, thank you. We got there in the end.

We did? ■

Oh, I don't know. Just off the top of my head:

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Egyptian Book of the Dead

The Bible

The Mahabharata

The Bhagavad-Gita

Homer,
The Iliad, The Odyssey

Aeschylus,
The Oresteia

Sophocles,
Oedipus the King, Antigone, Philoctetes

Euripides,
The Bacchae

Aristophanes,
The Birds, The Frogs

Thucydides,
The History of the Peloponnesian War

Aesop,
Fables

Ovid,
The Metamorphoses

Martial,
Epigrams

Saint Augustine,
The Confessions

Beowulf

Dante,
The Divine Comedy

Giovanni Boccaccio,
The Decameron

Miguel de Cervantes,
Don Quixote

Geoffrey Chaucer,
The Canterbury Tales

Sir Thomas Malory,
Le Morte D'Arthur

Sir Thomas More,
Utopia

Edmund Spenser,
The Faerie Queene

William Shakespeare

John Donne,
Sermons

Francis Bacon,
Essays

Robert Burton,
The Anatomy of Melancholy

Thomas Hobbes,
Leviathan

John Webster,
The Duchess of Malfi

Thomas Middleton and William Rowley,
The Changeling

John Bunyan,
The Pilgrim's Progress

John Milton,
Paradise Lost

Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver's Travels

Samuel Johnson

Daniel Defoe,
Robinson Crusoe

Henry Fielding,
The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling

Laurence Sterne,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman

Michel de Montaigne,
Essays

François Rabelais,
Gargantua, Pantagruel

Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Confessions

Erasmus,
In Praise of Folly

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe,
Faust, Pts I & II, Dichtung und Wahrheit

Victor Hugo,
Les Misérables

Stendhal,
The Charterhouse of Parma

Gustave Flaubert,
Madame Bovary

Henrik Ibsen

Jane Austen,
Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park

William Hazlitt,
Essays

Charles Dickens,
Great Expectations, Bleak House, Hard Times

John Ruskin,
Unto this Last

Anthony Trollope,
The Chronicles of Barsetshire

George Eliot,
The Mill on the Floss, Daniel Deronda, Middlemarch

Robert Louis Stevenson,
Treasure Island

Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good and Evil

Nikolai Gogol,
The Complete Tales, Dead Souls

Ivan Turgenev,
Fathers and Sons

Fyodor Dostoevsky,
Crime and Punishment, The Idiot

Leo Tolstoy,
War and Peace

Anton Chekhov

Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Essays, The Conduct of Life

Henry James,
The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors

William James,
The Varieties of Religious Experience

Italo Svevo,
The Confessions of Zeno

Fernando Pessoa,
The Book of Disquiet

Marcel Proust,
Remembrance of Things Past

Albert Camus,
The Stranger

Tristan Tzara,
Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries

Thomas Hardy,
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure

Rudyard Kipling

Max Beerbohm,
Zuleika Dobson

Joseph Conrad,
Lord Jim, The Secret Agent

Ronald Firbank

Ford Madox Ford,
The Good Soldier

D.H. Lawrence,
Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love

Virginia Woolf,
Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Waves

James Joyce,
Ulysses

Samuel Beckett,
Murphy, Watt, Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape

Henry Green,
Loving

Evelyn Waugh,
A Handful of Dust

Iris Murdoch,
The Black Prince, Bruno's Dream

Graham Greene,
Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter

Aldous Huxley,
Brave New World

William Golding,
Pincher Martin

Mervyn Peake,
The Gormenghast Trilogy

George Orwell,
1984

Bertolt Brecht,
Poems

Franz Kafka,
Stories, The Trial, The Castle

Thomas Mann,
The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice

Robert Musil,
The Man Without Qualities

Walter Benjamin,
Illuminations

Joseph Roth,
The Legend of the Holy Drinker

Mikhail Bulgakov,
The Master and Margarita

Boris Pasternak,
Doctor Zhivago

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Knut Hamsun,
Hunger

Bohumil Hrabal,
I Served the King of England, Too Loud a Solitude

Isaac Bashevis Singer,
Collected Stories

Malcolm Lowry,
Under the Volcano

William Faulkner, As
I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury

John Cheever,
Stories

I also like some living authors. But really, who cares. What I've read doesn't matter. Reading's not sufficient, any more than writing is sufficient. I had a teacher who used to say, ‘Don't tell me what you've read. Tell me what you've understood.' I also recall Graham Greene writing honestly of his reading: ‘Of course, I should be interested to hear that a new novel by Mr E.M. Forster was going to appear this spring, but I could never compare that mild expectation of civilized pleasure with the missed heartbeat, the appalled glee I felt when I found on a library shelf a novel by Rider Haggard, Percy Westerman, Captain Brereton or Stanley Weyman which I had not read before.' I wish Richmal Crompton had written another.

IF YOU CAN'T JUDGE a book by its cover, the reviews on its cover can, it seems, help. Writing in the
Observer,
Géraldine Bedell confessed, ‘I knew I was going to love this novel when I read the back jacket reviews of Sansom's previous book,
The Truth About Babies.'
(A round of Speedy Bap! Brie, Bacon and Avocado wraps to the design team for that one.) ‘I laughed, ' she claimed, ‘more times than I can remember over a novel in years … In a world swamped by Hollywood products and other multinational offerings,
Ring Road, ‘
she went on, ‘reminded me why novels are such a relief, so endlessly, incorrigibly surprising.' Michael Moorcock in the
Guardian
struck a similarly wistful note: ‘few books published these days, ' he mused, ‘can fairly be described as charming and fewer still are the product of so generous an intelligence'.
Ring Road,
he said, was like ‘a distant Sally Army brass band on a warm Sunday evening … mellow, intelligent and very funny, a perfect anecdote for melancholy″. Describing it as ‘a wonderfully comic novel', the
Daily Mail's
reviewer praised the author for his ‘acute sense of the absurd'. Sam Thompson in the
TLS,
meanwhile, found ‘something fearless in the gaze Sansom turns on banality'. For Thompson, the novel, ‘in the end', achieved the ‘surprisingly gripping feat of coming to terms with what ordinary life is like'. Ordinary life may be portrayed in all its ignominious glory but, as Francis King remarked in the
Spectator,
‘here is no ordinary talent'. Sansom, he concluded, is ‘a writer with a viewpoint and voice very much his own'.

Sandwich
A piece of meat between two slices of bread; so called from the Earl of Sandwich (the noted ‘Jemmy Twitcher'), who passed whole days in gambling, bidding the waiter bring him for refreshment a piece of meat between two pieces of bread, which he ate without stopping from play. This contrivance was not first hit upon by the earl in the reign of George III, as the Romans were very fond of ‘sandwiches', called by them
offula.

The Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
by E. Cobham Brewer (from the new and enlarged edition of 1894)

YOU'VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD of Bill Currie. I'll admit, among the pantheon of culinary innovators, the people who can be said literally to have changed the tastes of this nation – the Contance Sprys, Fanny Craddocks, Elizabeth Davids, Galloping Gourmets, Robert Carriers, Madhur Jaffreys, Delias, Jamies, Nigels and Nigellas – Currie is a figure of marginal interest. But chances are that if you took a British Rail train during the 1970s and found yourself moseying up to the buffet car, a crackle of manmade fibres, stomach rumbling, that morning's bowl of Golden Nuggets a dim and distant memory, and selected (probably against your better judgement) a forlorn-looking cheese and pickle sarnie (nothing fancy, you understand: white sliced bread, mild rubbery cheddar, cloying brown glue that yielded the occasional crunch) then you sampled a sandwich made to Bill Currie's exacting standards. Standards as exacting as our very own Bob Savory's, although obviously wafer-thin turkey and chicken tikka pieces in a yogurt dressing lay an oil crisis and a recession or two away.

Concerned about the beleaguered reputation of the British Rail butty, it was Bill, in his capacity as Director of Catering, who in November 1971 issued guidelines to help staff prepare and serve perfect sandwiches.
¹
From then on, if you were making a sandwich for British Rail, you made it the Bill Currie way. (What Bill and his team liked to call ‘the best on the track' way.) A sardine and tomato sandwich, for instance, wasn't fit for consumption unless it contained 2/3oz of sardine and a 1/3oz of tomato. These ratios were also demanded of the luncheon meat and cress combo – 2/3oz meat, naturally. (Whatever your opinion of luncheon meat, 2/3oz of cress really is inedible. You'd be picking the stuff out of your teeth for weeks afterwards for a start.) But with a frankfurter bap, a full oz of sausage was required – evidently Bill was canny enough to understand that in the wake of the Mexico 1970 World Cup and decimalization, generous portions, configured in imperial measurements, would be needed to lure hungry British passengers towards such dangerously Mitteleuropean fayre.

If Bill was fastidious about the proportions of the sandwich fillings, his instructions for
their construction were no less exacting. Knowing which side of the bread to butter (the side onto which the filling was placed is normally the preferred option, though Breville toasting machines did, of course, undermine this orthodoxy for a short while) is one thing. Knowing how much butter, and precisely where to spread it to ensure a flavoursome and yet visually appealing sandwich, is quite another matter entirely. And Bill, perceiving a dearth in the latter, commanded his staff to spread two-thirds of the butter, and then place at least a third of the filling, in the centre of the bread. When the sandwich was cut, diagonally corner-to-corner (like putting the milk in first when preparing tea, only plebs slice horizontally), and displayed hypotenuse outward on the counter, the filling and butter – plump and weeping from the middle – created a mouth-watering aspect. That was the theory, anyhow.

Just as Swift's Lilliput and Blefuscu warred over which end of an egg should be eaten first (big end vs. little end), distribution of butter and fillings (piled in the middle or,
pace
Bill, spread evenly across the bread) splits opinion. The American food writer M.F.K. Fisher (of whom W.H. Auden once claimed, ‘I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose') probably would not have enjoyed one of Bill's comestibles. Fisher comes down firmly on the side of an even spread. ‘The filling', she writes in
With Bold Knife and Fork
(1968), ‘should be of good quality, and should be spread or laid right to the sides of the foundation, and even spill over a little if feasible, rather than lie lumpishly in the middle.' Decorum prevents her from divulging the recipe in full but the sketch she offers for her family's favourite ham and mustard Railroad Sandwich (American diners, it's worth remembering, began life as railway dining cars) includes a secret ingredient (not very secret since it appears in the book) that even in the free-and-easy, kids' climbing-frames on concrete bases, municipal drinking fountains 1970s Bill would have rejected outright on health and safety grounds. The sandwich must be sat on for
at least
twenty minutes. British Rail passengers were no doubt at leisure, and certainly provided with ample opportunities, to experiment along these lines themselves while travelling or simply awaiting their connections. And who knows how many commuters, inadvertently creating this delicacy as they wrestled with four down (Flourished with craving for bacon 6), arose from their seats, swore, peeled a squashed BR double-round from the seat of their trousers and cast them into the bin before ever savouring the unique mix of wool pinstripe, compressed ham, mustard, butter and Mother's Pride.

How Fisher herself fell upon the idea is anyone's guess. Her wartime cookbook,
How to Cook a Wolf,
includes a prune roast. Cowardice has, so far, prevented me from trying it but I, for one, am not sure I'd be that pleased about letting anyone rustle up a batch of Railroads for high tea knowing that prune roast had earlier featured as
the plat du jour.
Serendipity and mobility are the abiding leitmotifs in sandwich history. Without the carelessness, and/or drunkenness, of a Nile-dweller who mixed ale instead of water into a dough
mixture in around 3000 BC we wouldn't have leavened bread; brewing and bread making developed symbiotically; the commonest Egyptian ale,
haq,
was produced by soaking partially baked red barley loaves in water for a day or so until they fermented (a sound historical reason why the patrons of the Castle Arms might find Margaret's plain cheese and ham sandwiches hit the spot with a pint).

In Exodus 12, Yahweh, unimpressed by these new-fangled breadstuffs, potent symbols of Egyptian decadence and Israelite oppression, tells Moses and Aaron to get the tribe to feast upon roasted lamb with unleavened bread and bitter herbs, once the whole shenanigan of daubing lintels with said lamb's blood is finished with. And after the Avenging Angel had had its way with the Egyptian firstborns, the Israelites, fleeing in haste, began their journey to the Promised Land with unleavened bread, remembered at
Pesach
in the
Sedar
and with the banishing of
chametz
from the home. The precise rules for the
Pesach
observances were given to Moses during the Israelites' second year in the wilderness of Sina'i. Yahweh was not, however, quite as exacting as possibly he could have been, as, perhaps, in the same position we can conceive Bill or Bob would have been. At Numbers 9:11, Moses is told that the
Pesach
offering should be eaten ‘with matzah and bitter herbs'; in Hebrew this is written as
‘al matzot u'marorim
but
‘al'
literally means ‘on top of '. Faced with this textual ambiguity, the great Rabbi Hillel proposed that the meat and bitter herbs be stacked on top of the matzah in what became known as the
korech.
The open-topped sandwich was then officially born to commemorate a swift departure after years of enforced confinement; a couple of thousand years later, passengers on British Rail could only munch into their luncheon meat and cress sandwiches and yearn for such a speedy deliverance.