Sandwiches

What for me was an insight woke me in the middle of the night. Before I went to sleep I had read a short piece from Tahir Shah’s new book Travels With Myself. It was called The Magic of the Ordinary, where, in writing with the qualities of a recorded daydream, a scruffy stranger tells Tahir that to understand the extraordinary you must first learn to appreciate ordinariness.

At three or four in the morning I found myself thinking about sandwiches, bought from a bakery at the end of over five, sometimes wet and windswept, hours exploring the city of Derry with my friend Karole. The bakery was near the bus station and round the corner from a pub called Sandinos, which doesn’t sell food but very generously told us where we might find some to eat with a creamy half Guinness and a cup of coffee.

Through the darkness of my bedroom I saw rays from the past, present and future converge on the soft, fresh bread that enveloped the fillings. Some originated from the time when our human ancestors began to cultivate grain, others from when they learned to use fire to cook. Closer to the sandwich were the people who extracted and refined metals to build ovens. The rays anastomosed and rebranched like ivy climbing a tree. Connected to the bread were mills and power plants, ports, salt mines and tarred roads, water reservoirs, money and people picking cotton. I could have followed a ray where yeast, seen with the aid of a microscope, appeared as individual ovoid cells, budding while gas oozed out; or been taken on a tour where the details of anaerobic respiration were explained. It didn’t seem outrageous to imagine that the number of connections surrouning the sandwich might approach infinity. What was certain was that there was much more to ordinariness than meets the eye.

I heartily recommend Travels With Myself to anyone reading this blog. It entertains, but is much more than entertainment. As is written on the back cover, ‘all the pieces in this book are designed to spark the imagination and to act as a catalyst for thought.

Travels With Myself is available now from Lulu.com and can be bought through Amazon in about six weeks’ time.