Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar Read online

  So pretending to run a sandwich bar gave me, I suppose, the pleasure of being someone else, leading a different life but without any of the consequences. It gave me tremendous satisfaction to talk about all my innovative baked-potato toppings and how I was one of the leading lights in the focaccia revolution, even going to the Italian town of Focaccia in the province of Panini to study different recipes. Did you know there’are a town in Southern France called Tourette and when you’re driving through there are people on the corner shouting ‘Arse!’ and ‘Bastard!’? No, hang on, that was me.

  But now if anybody asks how my sandwich bar is going I find I cannot be optimistic about the business any more. Like small traders everywhere, even in the imaginary world, I am facing competition. Other celebrities are getting in on the act: David Walliams with his chain of imaginary nail salons . . . no, hang on, that’s real. But it’s happening in the real world too. For example that sandwich bar in Holborn is still there, but it is now a branch of the chain Pret A Manger. There’s this hipster coffee-bar chain called Harris + Hoole, which is actually owned by Cáffé Nero. All the bushy beards their baristas have are just stuck on with glue and they peel them off at night. The restaurant chain Giraffe. The food at Giraffe does not resemble anything you would expect to be given in a restaurant; rather it is what might be served to the inhabitants of a badly run international moon colony – fajita hummus pockets, avocado spring onion doughnuts served on a salsa of stuffed chicken-wing gravy or Romanian-style waffle of teriyaki bacon with Cajun radish fried-crisp explosion. TGI Fridays epitomises the lies that these huge chains are built on because let’s face it most of the time it isn’t Friday, is it? But the management at head office back in Ohio forces all its employees to pretend it is Friday, every day of the week. If anybody asks what day it is, they have to reply, ‘Friday’.

  WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

  Occasionally, years ago, I would write about my sandwich bar in newspaper columns and, once again, sometimes I mentioned it was imaginary and at other times I didn’t. Certainly several people have told me over the years that they’d visited it. I loved having a column in a newspaper and I’ve worked for quite a few but now they themselves are nearly extinct and I’m sort of sad about that except for all you critics who gave me bad reviews! What are you doing now? Working in a mobile car-valeting service, that’s what! While I’m still here. Talking crap about an imaginary sandwich bar on the radio and then having it made into a book! While you’ve all been replaced by the internet. Ha ha ha!

  TAYLOR SWIFT CAN SEE YOU NOW

  The internet, Twitter, Instagram, all that, that’s what’s done for newspapers. I’ll tell you who’s really good at the internet – the singer Taylor Swift. She does all this stuff like she routinely retweets her followers and comments upon their photos. She also puts up posts on her personal feed of her interactions with her fans. At Christmas, which she renamed #Swiftmas, Taylor left a Santa emoji on the profiles of some fans (which is apparently a good thing) and she actually went out and personally delivered Christmas gifts to a select few of her followers. But what’s more interesting is that Taylor Swift also regularly has a few of her fans randomly attacked in the street and beaten up by anonymous assailants, their credit history is wiped out by nameless hackers or, if they’re in hospital, their medication gets mysteriously swapped with poison. Because Taylor Swift understands that you cannot have light without darkness, good without bad, yin without yang. This perhaps explains the murder of Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 with radioactive polonium. He was like . . . just a huge Taylor Swift fan.

  IT’S ALL A LIE

  Pretending crops up in the oddest places. You know, I have now actually got so fat that I’ve begun buying my clothes at shops that specialise in garments for the more portly gentleman. A chain of shops that I used to call Mister Fat Bastard. But I thought that there was something odd about the appearance of the man who served me. Then I figured it out. I don’t know if you know this but opticians who have perfect sight will still wear spectacles with plain glass in them just to reassure their customers, so it was that I suspected this man was really wearing a false stomach, so that his customers didn't feel self-conscious about their obesity. I myself felt reassured that I was being served by a fatty, even if he was a fake fatty. And that made me think that pretending perhaps plays a more important part in our lives than we acknowledge. For instance, we want our politicians to pretend that they are in control of events, that we are safe and secure, that if we simply vote the right way then things will be fine because they know what they are doing. But the truth is, nobody’s in control! Or maybe I was being a harbinger of things to come because these days there is not much that is real. Money isn’t real, it is no longer gold or even paper, it’s just numbers in a central bank’s computer; work isn’t real, nothing is made any more, people just spend days in meetings and nobody is who they say they are on the internet, if my experiences on Grindr are anything to go by.

  Chapter Two

  BARRY AND ANITA

  We keep our spare keys in a ceramic pot that I was given years ago by someone who was a first-year pottery student. I was getting some keys out of this jar for a friend.

  ‘That’s er . . . quite ugly,’ the friend said of the pot.

  ‘Is it?’ I replied. ‘I’d stopped noticing how horrible it looks.’

  ‘Then it’s a Grunty,’ she said.

  ‘A what?’ I asked.

  ‘A Grunty. It’s something you have in your house that’s hideous and useless but you’ve stopped noticing it completely, so it’s effectively invisible.’

  I was much taken with this idea and it brought to mind a couple we know whose small living room is more than half taken up by a huge, ugly and quite sickly Swiss cheese plant. Rather than throwing it out, they adapt each time a dangling mangy yellow leaf threatens to block out the picture from their TV by moving the sofa.

  As well as Grunties I think there are also Gruntyisms, things you say or do, though the reason why you say or do them has long since been forgotten. For example, every time we drink soup my wife and I always say the same thing; uttered in a strange monotone, we say, ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop.’ The way we came to say ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop’ every time that we drink soup came about like this. For a married couple the years between your mid thirties and your late forties might be seen as the decade of the bad dinner party. You are no longer looking for a partner so your inclination to visit crowded bars has receded but you are still full of energy so you don’t want to stay in at night. So instead you go to dinner parties attended by other couples you don’t necessarily like that much. One such couple were called Barry and Anita. Every time we ate at their house, Barry would make soup and when serving it he would invariably say, ‘There we are, soup, swoop, loop de loop.’ After the dinner party me and Linda would start talking about what an arse Barry was as soon as we were in the minicab going home. We would say to each other in a high-pitched mocking imitation of Barry’s voice, ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ and, ‘Please do have some more of this soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ then we would collapse against each other laughing, convincing the Algerian or Bengali taxi driver once again of the impenetrability and corruption of Western society. Pretty soon, when we had soup at home me and Linda would say to each other, ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop,’ at first still ridiculing Barry but eventually we forgot why we were saying it and long after we’d gratefully ceased having soupy dinners with Barry and Anita it had become part of the private language that every couple develops.

  In the early 1990s we had an exchange student staying with us for a year, a Māori girl from the Southern Pacific Cook Islands who, when she returned home, took the expression ‘Soup, swoop, loop de loop’ with her and spread it amongst her extended family until finally the phrase appeared in an anthropological dissertation: ‘“Soup, swoop, loop de loop”. Shamanistic Incantations in Rarotongan Food Preparation Rituals’, University of Topeka, 2001.

  YO-Y
O WHAT?

  Yo-Yo Ma, the famous Chinese-American cellist, came in today for his regular tandoori chicken wing ciabatta roll with parsnips. There’s actually an interesting story behind his name. In ancient times in China the yo-yo, now thought of as a toy, was originally a weapon or a tool for hunting. It was a sort of oriental version of the boomerang but obviously with a shorter range (though there are some legends of giant Han-dynasty war yo-yos that could destroy a city wall). In time, the use of the yo-yo became the exclusive province of certain highly trained martial arts clans and Yo-Yo Ma is the direct descendant of one of these families.

  THE REVOLUTIONARY IMPULSE

  I’d like to share my thoughts on political belief and pretending. Both my parents were members of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The violent overthrow of capitalism was sort of our family business. I always thought if we’d had a van it would have written on the sides in big letters: ‘Joseph Henry Sayle and Son, Revolutionaries. Estimates given, no Kalashnikovs left in this van overnight.’ Incidentally, there was a van parked outside my house a while ago from a firm that specialised in blocked drains and particularly sewage clearance and it said on the back door of the van: ‘CCTV a speciality. No stools left in this van overnight.’ I didn’t write it; I’m stealing material off the side of vans! Cricklewood Garage: it was on the side of a bus; I thought it might give you a bit of a laugh.

  When I became a teenager, my act of rebellion against my parents was to become more left-wing than them, so I joined a Maoist party. We’d have these rows at the breakfast table:

  ‘Don’t you call your mother a revisionist, running-dog lackey, our Lexi.’

  ‘Well she is, Dad, as Chairman Mao says, she’s waving the red flag to defeat the red flag!’

  But having both my parents as Communists meant I was essentially brought up in a cult. John Maynard Keynes said, ‘When the facts change, I change my opinion.’ But when you’re in a cult, when the facts change, you change the facts! To the end of her life my mother would never admit that there was anything wrong with the Soviet Union. The most she would admit was, ‘Mistakes were made.’ But as she used to say, ‘You can’t make an omelette without murdering forty million people.’

  The philosophical and ideological basis for Communism, which is Marxism, was essentially created in the nineteenth century in the same place where all the big ideas that would convulse the twentieth century were thought up – i.e., the various principalities and statelets that would later become Germany or the fading Austro-Hungarian Empire. Particularly one city – Vienna. We had Marxism, Freud and psychoanalysis, Einstein, who discovered relativity and the foundations of the nuclear age, Zionism, the idea of a permanent homeland for the Jewish people, and Fascism – I mean there’s something there for everybody, don’t you think? If you can’t find an idea there that appeals to you, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

  ‘CARLUCCIO’S!’

  My experience of being brought up in this atmosphere of Communism has given me a fascination with people who try and change the world, and the effects that their actions have. Personally I have nothing to do with party politics. Though I remain left-wing, my firmly held conviction has always been that stand-up comedians should have absolutely nothing to do with one political party, no matter how much they might support that party’s policies. I am aware that others might not agree. I seem to remember that Eddie Izzard once had plans to run as Labour Party candidate for Mayor of London (or maybe he was planning to run as mayor of eleven different cities on eleven different consecutive days in aid of Children in Need). Either way, that scheme seems to have gone away. Eddie Izzard runs loads of marathons, doesn’t he? Like ten, one after the other. And what I take away from that is that it’s a lot easier to run marathons than you think. On the right Jimmy Carr sits in the Storting, the Norwegian Parliament, as an MP for the centre-right Kristent Samlingsparti, the Christian Unity Party (though this may be part of a strategy by Jimmy to try and gain some kind of Europe-wide parliamentary immunity).

  Eddie Izzard also does his act in loads of different countries in loads of different languages. I’m thinking of doing that as well. This is the opening bit of my French act: it goes, ‘Liberté, égalité, salon de thé!’ It’s shit, but it’s in French! And my Italian act just consists of me shouting ‘Carluccio’s!’ over and over again.

  The reason I believe we comics have to steer clear of any and all political parties is that we have a sacred duty to, as the Quakers put it, ‘Speak Truth to Power’. (I also shout obscenities at the man who works on the fish counter at Morrisons but that’s something different.)

  But I want to remain politically engaged so what I do is I involve myself in loads of single-issue causes like homelessness, animal rights . . . people sometimes criticise us animal rights activists because we concentrate on fur rather than leather, but I say it’s a lot easier to harass an old lady than a biker gang! I cycle everywhere. You’ve heard of MAMILS, Middle Aged Men in Lycra, well I’m a PUFFIN, a Pathetic, Unfit, Fat Fellow in Nappies. By nappies I mean the huge wodge of foam I have to wear between my legs to stop the razor-thin saddle splitting me in half. And environmental issues: I recycle, and every time I take a flight I plant a tree . . . which really annoys the cabin crew!

  Pathetic, Unfit, Fat Fellow in Nappies

  WE’RE QUITE NICE REALLY

  So as I was saying, I think despite all the chaos we create, the famines, the gulags, left-wing people are basically good people. Admittedly revolutionary left-wing regimes might over time devolve into authoritarian kleptocracies whose autocratic rule is enforced by terror and torture, but we do mean well. We’re nice people and sincere in our beliefs, unlike right-wingers. Let’s face it, if you’re a Tory, say, you’re a bit of a bastard. Mildly xenophobic, reactionary, greedy; you don’t want others to have what you have and you like golf.

  Regardless of the chaos that comes later, we left-wingers at least start out with the intention of bringing a fairer world to more or less everybody, whereas right-wingers are only ever interested in bringing advantage to a narrow group – themselves and people like them. And the further right you go, the nastier people get.

  My first volume of memoir, Stalin Ate My Homework, was a warm-hearted evocation of growing up in a Communist household. Now you simply couldn’t write a warm-hearted evocation of growing up in a Nazi household, could you? ‘Dad came in last night hungry for his tea after an evening spent attacking Pakistanis with a claw hammer. . .’ It doesn’t work, does it? ‘Oh how we laughed when mum used to scream in the streets about the Jews controlling world finance.’

  The BNP, the British National Party, were the successors to the Fascist National Front and I actually know a bloke who accidentally hosted a BNP wedding! He had a big historic barn and fields on his land that he rented out for weddings and he took this booking not knowing that the bride and groom and all their friends were in the BNP and he said the thing you noticed was how absolutely horrible they all were! Rude, aggressive, drunken, chippy. And they even had a BNP wedding planner! ‘Yes, we’ll have a line of SS Stormtroopers scattering petals in front of the bride and groom and the band will play “Tomorrow Belongs To Me” as you make your vows, honest, it’ll be gorgeous. . .’

  And apparently stupid too. As well as running my imaginary sandwich bar, I am Pretend Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the University of Uppsala or somewhere. One of the tropes that defines bigots is the absolute certainty they have in their beliefs, right? Now there’s this thing in cognitive psychology called the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect apparently shows that ‘low intelligence’ is often accompanied by increased confidence in one’s opinions and an apparent inability to accurately judge your own abilities and expertise in comparison to others’. Also a willingness to present your poorly thought-out conclusions as cast-iron facts. In other words, the Dunning-Kruger effect proves that stupid people don’t know they’re stupid! They think they’re dead clever! And just to confirm you
r experiences, if you’ve had anything to do with BT Broadband, incompetent people don’t have the ability to know that they’re incompetent – they think they’re bleeding great!

  In a political sense I find all this very worrying. I have always subscribed to the liberal notion that if you just sat a person with disturbed, anti-social ideas down, somebody such as Hitler or Pol Pot, and talked to them rationally for a long, long time, possibly aided by a chart, a PowerPoint presentation, some maps, a list of statistics and an article written by Simon Jenkins in the Guardian, then eventually they would change their minds.

  ‘Oh man,’ Pol Pot would say after I’d been going on at him for a bit, ‘I see it now, Alexei, that whole Year Zero, Killing Fields thing, oh that was like some messed-up shit, man! Oh I feel so ashamed!’

  And Saddam Hussein would have gone, ‘Jeeze Louise! Me attacking Iran, oh well, Alexei, that was just plain wrong!’

  And Tony Blair would say, ‘Oh Alexei, I’m s—’, Oh, that’s not going to happen ever.