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’.