TAXES ON FATTY AND UNHEALTHY FOODS HAVE BEEN CONSIDERED. RICHARD CURTIS DISCUSSES TAX AND THE SANDWICH
We all must know that the sandwich was supposedly invented by the Earl of Sandwich. Rumour has it that he was an inveterate gambler and was reluctant to be drawn away from a card table for such minor inconveniences as having to eat.
Thus, instead of having to traipse off to the dining room and while away two or three hours on a formal lunch, entrée, soup, fish, meat, pudding, what have you, he would ask his manservant to bring him two slices of bread with a chunk of meat inserted between them.
This begat the boom in the country’s gaming industry, mega casinos, sandwich jokes, the invention of clingfilm, jam, lemon curd, piccalilli, little flags with ‘ham and mustard’ printed on them, the Boots ‘meal deal’, ‘Pret-A-Manger’ and a thousand other catering businesses.
In fact, now I think of it, I believe that ‘Earl’ as he was known to his friends is the root cause of the whole British culture of not taking a break for lunch. One minute the sandwich is a piece of beef and some wholemeal bread while we have a game of cards, next it’s the ‘working lunch’ and then, before you know it, it’s ‘lunch is for wimps’ and we’re slogging away, nine ’til five, without a break.
How unlike the culture in, say, Italy – home of ‘slow food’ as opposed to our ubiquitous ‘fast food’ – where the ‘three-hour lunch’ (and I don’t mean the liquid variety) is the norm whatever day of the week it is.
‘Ah, it’s the culture,’ you may say.
‘Culture my ****’, I reply. ‘It’s the weather’.
You see, to make a decent sandwich you need butter. But there’s no butter in Italy. ‘Why’s that?’ you ask. It’s because there are no cows and before you ask, that’s because there’s no grass, and that’s because there’s no rain and that’s why the Italians can spend all summer on the beach except between midday and 3pm when they are eating spaghetti and doing whatever else Italians do on a hot afternoon.
See, weather; told you so!
‘But are they happy’ you ask. Of course they’re happy; but look at the state of their tax system! No doubt that’s because they are not working through their lunch hours like us and that’s because of that great British invention (pushes chair back and stands to attention) the sandwich. (Breaks into Rule Britannia.)
The deskwich
Anyway, my nickname is also Earl – as in ‘the Earl of Deskwich’. The deskwich being the next evolutionary step in the sandwich story and defined as ‘a sandwich eaten at one’s desk’, or – as Schott’s Words of the Year tells us, cruelly maintaining the Italian connection, ‘a sandwich eaten al desko’.
Another subtle jibe at our hard-working British lads and lasses whose lunchtime deskwich eaten while they gaze across the wasteland that is the corporation tax file of Blogg’s Car Body Repairs Ltd is the nearest they probably got to an al fresco picnic this year. But I digress …
Like many other white-collar workers, those of us in the tax business must by now be well accustomed to deskwich life. If you are lucky, your firm will provide a kitchen where, perhaps, the deskwich can be prepared at lunchtime if, like me, your early morning schedule doesn’t leave time for its manufacture before you leave home.
Or you may simply use the office fridge to keep your deskwich in tip-top condition – lettuce crispy, mayo cold – until lunchtime. One possible hazard is then that the deskwich has ‘gone missing’ by midday. I have known this to happen to someone who told me that the only effective cure that he had found to this problem was to spread a rumour around the office that he never washed his hands before making his deskwich.
Health and hygiene
Hand-washing brings us of course to the subject of hygiene, about which you may or may not be so particular. I did read that the average office desk has 400 times more bacteria on it than the average lavatory seat, although I doubt whether that will persuade many office workers to change their lunch location.
It’s therefore probably a good idea to ensure that your desk has a regular cleaning. And now I look more closely, I would tend to suggest that you include the computer keyboard in the equation as well.
I have a feeling that I could probably make this lunchtime’s deskwich out of the pieces of bread roll and cheese that I can see nestling down there between the keys! Perhaps I should leave a note for the cleaner to run the vacuum cleaner across the keys, although that makes me wonder where else the vacuum cleaner has been.
Perhaps the simple answer is to bring in one of those nice red check tablecloths and spread that across the desk, keyboard and files – perhaps tucking it into my shirt collar as well – before I settle down for my midday repast.
The topping
I think it was Napoleon who said that a tax department marches on its stomach – well he would if he’d been a tax partner rather than a megalomaniac with an army. Now I think of it, didn’t I use to work for...
No never mind, that’s another story. And reverting to the start of this article, another story is that far from being committed to the gambling table, it was the Earl’s dedication to his work-desk that resulted in the sandwich, or deskwich as it perhaps should originally have been known.
Anyway, don’t neglect lunch, have a healthy snack, perhaps go for a walk, think about something other than tax (duties perhaps?) and just chill out for an hour – or three if you’re reading this in Rome.
Buon appetito!
