On cold meat sandwiches

A hillside in Buckinghamshire, overlooking acres unperturbed by the fussy botherings of mass human population since the stifling summer of 1349, and I am hungover. I am also about to eat the best cold lamb sandwich of my life. A salty crust, oozing blanched reservoirs of fat giving way to pink flesh all enwrapped in a crudely hewn section of a crusted baguette. The author of both my hangover and this delightful cure of it is my godfather- a rotund reservoir of generous bonhomie, who, whilst he might have been created by Dickens in a lighter moment, such is propensity for hospitality, was in fact an army friend of my father’s and, since 1992 has been entrusted with my spiritual growth.

A side street in Cambridge and outside a building wedged between blue plaques and adolescent disappointments a friend and I wash the last crumbs of a superlative cold beef sandwich from our mouths with sloshes of beer. Topside fridge-cold, slimy in its rareness, beautiful. We watch our fellow ordinands trot into the church opposite, shooting glances of disapproval (to which we are well used) at our kerbside act of defiance. Yet, inevitably, at the last moment we join them too- allowing ourselves a bout of pleasing somnolence in a back pew, induced not by a rejection of the celebration of Corpus Christi in this, the beating heartland of England’s Protestantism, but by that other marker of Englishness the Reformation historians all too often overlook- good beef and good beer.

A crowded pub courtyard at the very bottom of Highgate Hill. The Southampton Arms claims to serve the best pork sandwiches in London. I have no desire to set off on a quest to disprove them. Merely to sit and allow minutes to become hours to become an afternoon and crackling, thick tranches of tepid pig, and a pillow-soft roll to work their magic as my friends and I sit, becoming drunk not only on beer but on tobacco fumes in that pleasingly densely packed yard, on stories long fermented in our communal cask of memories, and on superlative pork sandwiches. For the Southampton Arms tells no lies and they are intoxicating.

Sterling though the company is during such experiences, there are moments when one’s mind is allowed to wander- a loo break, an expedition to purchase the next round, those lulls in conversation which are allowed and can be borne only when the parties are truly at ease with one another. It will sound sickeningly pious (and God knows, surely, that I am not) but in such moments my mind turns to the King James Bible. I could write a long reflection on that translation which, despite (or, acknowledging my more destructive delight in pissing people off, because of) its many detractors, is by far my favourite, an anchor in all my flitting and failures and the one alone which enables this particular dog to truly hear His Master’s Voice. Yet I will not, for its glory is no ordinary one at all, but one that transforms everything that it touches- from how we write and speak English today to the lives of countless poor sinners, from John Newton to Florence Nightingale, to me.

But back to cold meat sandwiches, for, as the good Earl knew, their great advantage is that they might be left, while a pleasing diversion is engaged with and then taken back up again with gusto. Indeed, I often think that the second or third attempts at tackling a sandwich are the ones which are really satisfying, the bites that prove one’s mettle. Put another way- no medals are won in an initial assault, and the dogged enjoyment of a sandwich Rorke’s Drift is more satisfying than a rapid consumption of a snack based Isandlwana. But we have put our sandwich down again in order to walk down a very strange side alley- let us take it up again for a final assault.

The King James Version routinely conflates bread and meat as generic words for food. This, of course, reflects a world whose culinary culture was free from the delights of quinoa or mushroom based meat substitute yet, I would suggest, it also makes a deeper point. The bread of Heaven is one that is conflated forever with flesh, with body, a body, his body, his flesh. Those early Roman accusations of cannibalism seem a little more understandable within the boggy misunderstandings this particular linguistic marshland. Yet, to apply the linguistic to the eucharistic is a fool’s errand. Our partaking of the body of Christ is, as Dr Cranmer was at pains to point out with his long words of distribution, both for our physical nourishment and for a nourishment of something much, much deeper. In that sense, meat and bread fulfil in this the perfect, the ultimate expression of that which they achieve in the Southampton Arms, on a Buckinghamshire hillside, or a Cambridge side street- in each place bread and meat both obscure and enable much more nourishing bonds. So it is with that bread, that meat, which leads us to a bond more nourishing than any other.

Visiting the Southampton Arms of a Saturday, I often have to leave first, catching a train back to Liverpool whilst my friends continue the circling round of beer and cold meat sandwiches until nourishment becomes excess and well beyond. As I make that walk south to Euston, in the midst of the musk of a London afternoon, I will often whistle or sing a song to myself, as one only does when refreshed by alcohol and company. Next time I wander past the villas and offies at the bottom of Highgate hill, I know which tune will, invariably appear on my cerebral jukebox: ‘Bread of Heaven on Thee we feed, for thy flesh is meat indeed’.