Ring Road

by Ian Sansom

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.

  About the book

  A Critical Eye

  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 Spread by Travis Elborough

  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 c
omestibles. 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.

  1 British Rail catering did not escape the beady eye of Elizabeth David. In a chapter on Toast in English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977), David berates BR for charging 12 pence a slice for toast when a 12-slice white loaf at that time cost a mere 15p.

  Read on

  Have You Read?

  The Truth About Babies: From A–Z

  Taking Cyril Connolly’s ‘pram in the hall’ for a spin round the block, Sansom offers a series of meditations on every aspect of babies – from bathing, boredom, breastfeeding and buggies to weaning, weight, words and work. The result is a profound, philosophical and frequently very funny Dictionary of Infants.

  ‘Packed full of wry, poignant observations on all aspects of babydom … One to enjoy with a nightcap’ New Baby

  ‘A true and beautiful book … Every new parent should have a copy for their journey through that first year’ Guardian

  ‘Funny and touching and true’ Evening Standard

  If You Loved This, You’ll Like …

  The Scheme for Full Employment

  Magnus Mills

  Crushed by the wheels of indolence and infighting, a Utopian work scheme involving a fleet of white vans hits the buffers in a spellbinding novel that puts the K into Fred Kite.

  Mondo Desperado: Stories

  Patrick McCabe

  Welcome to Barntrosna! As writer in residence Phildy Hackball reveals, this seemingly charming little Irish town has witnessed some mighty strange goings-on – go-go dancing swingers, exploding novice priests, lesbian nurses and Kung Fu superstars. Oh yes, all life is here, sister.

  The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy

  Laurence Sterne

  The shaggiest dog of all shaggy dog tales, Sterne’s masterpiece is the blueprint of every digressive, playful and textually adventurous novel since. See Robert McCrudden’s Creative Writing course (Lecture 7: ‘The Novel – Making Things Up for Pleasure and Profit’) at the institute.

  The Third Policeman

  Flann O’Brien

  Murder, a mad scientist and the story of an unrequited love affair between a man and his bicycle. O’Brien’s absurdist satire about a village police force is a masterpiece.

  Three Men in a Boat

  Jerome K. Jerome

  Three clerks (‘to say nothing of the dog’) go on a jaunt up the River Thames in Jerome’s whimsical but still wonderful comic classic.

  A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

  Dave Eggers

  Eggers’s gambolling memoir about losing both his parents and raising his younger brother really does live up to its title.

  Sweet Desserts

  Lucy Ellmann

  Surely, any novel with an index which actually has an entry for the index (Index, 143–5) deserves a place in your life and on your bookshelf? Tuna sandwiches feature to boot.

  Find Out More

  http://www.theenthusiast.co.uk

  Two of Billy Nibbs’s poems graced The Enthusiast’s debut issue. Need we say more? I think not.

  www.mcsweeneys.net

  In the worldwide web, where ever more convenient shopping has usurped Content, the Old King, Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s Internet Tendencies is an online institution worth clinging onto.

  www.sandwich.org.uk

  Home of the British Sandwich Association.

  http://ukulele.org

  Sadly, copies of Bill and Antoinetta Bell’s masterwork The Two Little Fleas are rarer than hen’s teeth these days. Visit this site, though, to discover more about this mellifluous stringed instrument and, perhaps, download a copy of The Fleabag Songbook.

  By the same author

  The Truth About Babies

  Praise

  From the reviews of Ring Road:

  ‘It reminded me most of Jerome K. Jerome & Mellow, intelligent and very funny, a perfect antidote for melancholy’

  Michael Moorcock, Guardian

  ‘Calls to mind two other outstanding novels; Tristram Shandy & and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 & One of those rare books that, once picked up, proves very difficult to put down’

  Irish Independent

  ‘In all his rambling, digressive warmth, Sansom insists throughout that, contrary to fashionable opinion, human life is as eccentric and various in the small and overlooked corners as it is in the big city’

  Daily Telegraph

  ‘Wonderfully comic’

  Daily Mail

  ‘Quirky, perky & Here is no ordinary talent’

  Spectator

&n
bsp; ‘Daring & Funny & Fearless’

  Times Literary Supplement

  ‘A dissection of small-town life & recognisable to any reader who has ever lived in one, in England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland’

  Independent

  ‘Wonderfully vivid, easy, natural, funny, and moving’

  Oliver Sacks

  ‘Delightful. I have read it with much pleasure’

  Joyce Carol Oates

  ‘What a delight! I had no intention of stopping everything to read it – but then I did … I have never been to Northern Ireland but now I feel at home there’

  Charles Simic

  ‘Cross Jonathan Franzen with Henry Fielding, and what you have is a twenty-first-century lament for times past dressed in eighteenth-century clothing, complete with chapter summaries, footnotes, and an index. Read this book with someone close at hand because you’ll want to keep quoting the funny bits’

  Library Journal

  ‘Rich and inventive and inclines you toward generosity … A humane, big-hearted and sometimes devastatingly funny book, not to be underestimated’

  Geoff Nicholson, LA Weekly

  ‘A work of tender and bonhomous refraction’

  Claire Messud, Newsday

  ‘Fluent, flawless, richly observed & reminiscent of Roddy Doyle at his very best’

  Jockey Slut

  ‘A poetic elegy for a community’

  Irish Times

  ‘Sharply drawn & gloriously funny’

  (BMI Voyager magazine)

  ‘Fabulous … It made me cry on the Belfast to Bangor train’

  County Down Spectator

  Copyright

  Harper Perennial

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

  77–85 Fulham Palace Road

  Hammersmith

  London W6 8JB