Greetings from Sandwich

This was disappointingly below what Asiimov was expecting. He had something with a bit more character and presence in mind. But what could one expect from a place called Sandwich?

Sandwich Station is every bit as literal as the name suggests; a train track sandwiched between two platforms in the middle of nowhere. When he got off the train, Asiimov was full of exuberant energy, ready to gorge on whatever this town had to offer. By the time he would board the returning train to London, he’d be starving to death, exhausted, on the verge of weeping, and never wanting to visit this town ever again.

Asiimov had come here for one reason, to see if this town had a good sandwich culture. A logical supposition to make, given the name of the town.

“Is it like Cornwall where they do a banging Cornish pastie?” a friend had asked him the night before.

“I don’t know, but I’ll find out tomorrow,” he replied.

And here he was, right in the heart of Sandwich to find out.

People with insight into the English aristocracy may have heard or read about The Earl of Sandwich. Is there a connection between the person and the place? I don’t fucking know.

Anyway, these are trifles unimportant to Asiimov’s tragedy in Sandwich.

A traveller has two potential directions to take when exiting Sandwich Station; either go to Sandwich Town or Sandwich Bay. Considering it was a beautiful day, miraculously beautiful by British standards, Asiimov decided to visit Sandwich Bay first and laze on the beach. The town wouldn’t be going anywhere, this dazzling sun, on the other hand, was on a tight and capricious schedule. So in the direction of the beach, he headed.

Backwater South England seaside towns come in many different flavours. You’ve got miserably industrial Dover. Wanna-be-Brighton Margate. Getting mugged in broad daylight Ramsgate. This was retirement community Sandwich.

Immediately after leaving the station, Asiimov found himself in the nucleus of an upper-middle-class suburban labyrinth. One residential street connected to another and on and on it went, presumably till the end of the Earth. Who knows, unless they chart that course themselves? Nothing but wonderfully stately homes extended as far as the eye could see. Bungalows with steep roofs hanging low like willow-o-the-wisps. Quaint cottages bathing in the golden sunlight. Multi-story houses of all shapes and sizes endlessly populated the scenery. And without exception, luscious gardens – some even with automatic sprinklers – abutted each house. These were the kinds of houses where one either grows up with a happy childhood or grows old with indifferent age. These idyllic houses are the perfect places to spend the winter years of life. The air here was as fresh as an oasis, the kind you can bag up and sell online to the citizens of a horribly air-polluted nation.

Had Asiimov taken his earphones out, he would’ve had for music the orchestral song of a swarm of birds belting out a mellifluous tune simply for the sake of vanity.

For over half an hour he walked through this suburban monotony with nothing but happy old folk and their happy old homes in sight. Asiimov was supremely out of place here. With no one of his age around, he was reliant upon the anonymity his large blue and green tartan winter coat provided him. Snugly hide in the depths of the coat and hope it adds a few decades to your age, that was his idea of blending in.

After some more walking, Asiimov spotted someone coming his way who didn’t look like a pensioner. It was an assumption, granted, but one based on the absence of a walking stick or mobility scooter or a heavily hunched back.

“Excuse me!” he called out as the figure got closer, revealing herself to be a warm-looking woman in her mid-30s. A small and ugly dog was in tow that Asiimov paid no attention to.

“I’ve been walking for over half an hour and there seems to be no escape from this neighbourhood. Am I going the right way to get to Sandwich Bay?”

She laughed a lovely laugh, took out the other Airpod and replied kindly, “Yes you are. But I’ll warn you, your shoes will get muddy.”

Her eyes were pinned on Asiimov’s unsuitable black Converse high-tops. Were she a more judgmental person, she would’ve contemptuously thought, “What an unprepared fool!” Fortunately for him, she wasn’t.

“I’ve just come from that way and the whole road is flooded,” she announced as a word of warning.

Clearly she was a local, based solely on her sturdy hiking shoes.

“Well, thank you very much. Have a nice day!” Asiimov bid her and continued on his path.

With each passing meter, the density of houses decreased to straggling homesteads until there was nothing but open fields engulfing the road from either side. Just before this transition in scenery took place, however, Asiimov failed to notice a salient detail. All the cars parked outside the houses were caked in a thick layer of mud. Whatever colour they were underneath made no difference to the brown, dirty uniformity that had marked all the vehicles here.

With the suburban houses went also the pavement which meant Asiimov had to walk the rest of the day on the side of the open road. Walking on the side of the oncoming cars seemed best to him as he could spot them coming rather than having one creep up right behind and scare the daylights out of him when it'd blare its horn. Each time a car came his way, he’d jump out of the way and hug the side of the road, letting the car past like a gigantic four-wheeled grandmother.

Asiimov was in farm country now, he could tell because the air was so fresh. So fresh that the smell of cow shit pervaded every molecule. The offending animals were grazing on the other side of the fence beside the road. He saluted them while walking past, a testament to his strangely good mood that was about to be utterly ruined.

It is characteristic of happy people that they never have their heads hanging down when they’re walking. Instead, they have their sights on all the wonders around them. When Asiimov stepped into a deep and muddy puddle, his foot completely swallowed up to his ankles by the quicksand, he instantly became a cautionary tale for all those happy souls who don’t look down while walking. To a screeching halt he came as the sensation of his shoe being flooded put his nervous system on high alert. The horror he felt while looking at his foot became tenfold when his eyes scanned all around him and he was standing in the middle of something resembling the River Indus. He had indeed reached the flooded road and there wasn’t a dry patch of ground around him to escape. His options were limited to wading through the water ahead of jumping onto the grassy escarpment on either side of the road which had turned into a treacherous embankment of mud.

Frozen in place as if his foot was on top of a landmine, Asiimov screamed, “GODDAMIT!” and it went echoing over the English countryside to be heard by some distant farmer in Kent tending to his livestock.

Slowly he retrieved his foot from this muddy maw. A long squelch issued from the ground as his foot became free, resembling those muddy cars back there.

“This is fine,” said Asiimov to himself. He’d wash his foot, shoe, and socks in the sea and hopefully, the sun would dry out his sock and shoe. After all, he had an open return ticket, so he had all day to explore every layer of Sandwich and could take any train back to London. Besides, he wasn’t going to let this ruin his supernal mood.

Now he just had to figure out how to make it clear of this river he was in the middle of. With only one foot ruined, it was obvious to put the crippled foot to use and hop through the river on that foot while preserving the other. So that’s what he did, sending splashes of mud everywhere as he traversed this prodigious flood.

For another 20 minutes he walked, his foot squelching with every step as he carried with him one of the worst inconveniences to beset a human; wearing wet socks!

Finally, the horizon dropped away from him and he could see water ahead. It was a rocky beach, ideal considering it would be less messy.

A gang of seagulls were perched on the roof of these grand and empty hotels on the beachfront, surveying their territory like drug dealers watching their patch. When Asiimov set foot on their rocky turf, their heads swivelled in his direction as they sized him up with blankly intimidating eyes. Not wanting to be shoved around by seagulls, he shot them an equal measure of hungry malice too. Because hungry he was, ravenous even. He’d been up since 4:30 am and now it was 12:10 in the afternoon and there wasn’t a morsel in his stomach. Usually, he couldn’t go too long without food as hunger would turn him into a foul and disagreeable beast. But that’s fine, he could survive for a bit on the beach and then he’d treat himself to this sandwich and answer the age-old question of whether the sandwiches are any good in Sandwich.

He ran straight down to the surf, kicked his filthy shoe and sock off and plunged his foot into the freezing cold seawater. It was unpleasant but clean. He looked around and found himself being the only human presence on this whole beach. As far as the eye could see, there was not a single living soul. Perfect. Wearing only one shoe while the other one hanging in his hand, he took a walk down the featureless landscape reclaimed from human control. He experienced the acute feeling of being on the shore of some distant world where the sun shone with strange brilliance, illuminating the wet stones and making them glisten like a billion jewels studded in the ground.

Here he was, at the end of this part of civilisation, with no more land ahead of him. The rules of society ended just a few paces ahead of him, replaced by the lawless rule of the sea. He could relax here for a bit, somewhere the influences of society couldn’t touch him.

Using his backpack as a pillow, he lay on the stony floor and luxuriated in the outstanding natural beauty of the sea. That murky, dishwater-coloured water that’s so typical of British beaches was lined by a strip of bright blue in the distance where the clean water of the channel became too deep for anyone without a boat. An island wind farm stuck out of the horizon in the supreme distance like white toothpicks. They waved their propellor blades at Asiimov like over-excited children. And although the sky above him was completely clear, the horizon was decorated by a mountain range of titanic clouds that punctuated the illimitable distance of the Earth.

Lost in daydreams, Asiimov imaged the airplanes flying above to be jet-powered seagulls that had embraced the miracles of aerospace engineering to evolve past their feathery predecessors. It was time to skip some stones, his favourite stone-beach pastime, considering he had an unlimited supply of them. One by one he’d throw flat and wide stones, trying to skim them over the water. Most of them would sink straight down into the frothing blue waves crashing on the shore. The angle he threw them at was wonky. Although, sometimes he managed to make them skip two or three times before they were claimed by the impossible blue. Then he busied himself with looking for the perfect stone, one that’s the perfect width and flatness. If thrown properly this hypothetical stone would defy the laws of physics and aerodynamics and skip all the way to Calais and land on the French shores before startled beachgoers. Alas, such a stone was never found.

But a different and altogether wild thought struck Asiimov. How long would it take him to empty this entire beach of stones if he threw them one by one into the sea? A few hundred years? A few thousand? Who knows? One thing’s for sure, though. If the universe is truly infinite then somewhere in the boundless depths of space exists another planet Earth where another Asiimov is testing this bizarre and counterproductive theory.

Without a trace of humanity and at the height of happiness, he decided to lay down and feast on the view some more. Only a few minutes of this bliss he got, however, when his phone pinged. It was a text message from Camden Council, reminding him his council tax was overdue. Ah, a summons from society. Even as far out as the edge of civilisation was there was no escape from the baggage of life. Oh well, he thought, might as well get this done now. How long could it possibly take anyway?

Promptly calling the number in the text message he was put on hold until the council office would connect him to an operator. The minutes dragged out ahead of him as they usually do when someone is put on hold. Before he knew it, he’d been on hold for over a half hour. A peculiar determination possessed him, the kind that does to people who have been left on hold for too long. The determination to see this phone call through to the very end. I’m in too deep, thinks the average person, this will be a waste of my time if I hang up now. This was what Asiimov was thinking too, so he saddled up and gambled himself to the rest of the phone call.

Half an hour turned into an hour. This would be an hour of his life he would never get back if he hung up, was his retort to his saner self. An hour and a half now, and by this point he had memorised the hold music note for note. At least he had the sense to take one earphone out and have the serene sound of the waves lapping the shore going in one ear counteract the hold music in his other. It was almost two hours by the time they picked up and the voice of a human greeted him on the other end. He had to restrain himself from screaming in celebration. The ultimate kick in the balls was to come, though. After he asked if he could pay the bill over the phone, the operator simply patched him through to the automated payment service which Asiimov skipped at the start of the phone call because he wanted to entrust this payment to a human! Grumbling abuse to himself that’s too foul to mention here, he paid the bill and mourned those dearly departed two hours of his life. The sun was going down and it was becoming too cold to stay, so he got up to leave.

It was nearly dark by the time Asiimov got back to the train station. He felt as dispirited as the sky looked after losing the sun. But now it was time for that sandwich he’d come all this way for. It was past 6 pm now and his excruciating hunger was a major contributing factor to his rotten mood.

Sandwich was as much as one could expect from a town populated almost entirely by the elderly; still as a cemetery at midnight, quiet as a cemetery at midnight, and about as atmospheric too. With cobbled streets here and there, roads barely wide enough for a single car, and houses opening out straight into the street without warning, the place looked like it never aged out of the 1950s. But that’s fine, thought Asiimov. Sandwiches used to exist in the 50’s so as long as I can find out, this trip won’t be a complete disaster.

Expectedly, the town was tiny. An average person could jog from one end to the other without needing to catch their breath. But nowhere was there a sandwich shop or an establishment that sold them to be found. Asiimov searched high and low in frenetic desperation. Past 6 pm, all the cafes that could sell sandwiches were closed and the only places open right now were pubs that sold no food whatsoever. Consumed by an insane fury which he had to bottle up as this wasn’t an appropriate setting to release it, he decided it was time to leave this godforsaken place.

Asiimov had been extra considerate of the locals. With a place called Sandwich, he could imagine the chagrin of the locals when obnoxious tourists came up and asked them about where the best sandwiches in Sandwich were to be had and made wisecracks about sandwiches. He had thought better than to harangue the locals with his mission, despite being here for the same reason as all those tourists in his head. And this is how this town repays him?! He was out of here for good.

On his walk to the station through this somnambulant town, however, he did spot one redeeming sight. A SPAR was open. For the unfamiliar, SPAR is a chain of petrol station convenience stores that sell, among other things, sandwiches, albeit of a rather questionable quality. Fuck it! thought Asiimov, this is better than nothing. In he went, making a beeline for the sandwich fridge and grabbed himself a cheese and onion on malted bread, along with a KitKat Chunky and a Fanta. All for £3.99.

Giddily he marched to the train station before his fortunes turned back the other way. The joy of finally leaving this place was urging his one dry and one wet foot along.

Sitting down on a bench on this dark platform, he animalistically tore open the sandwich box and bit into it precisely like a person extremely starved. Within seconds the sandwich was gone. It was objectively disgusting. It tasted like wet cardboard. But by god, Asiimov was holding back tears while eating it. That chemical-y egg and cheese mayonnaise felt like a gift from the gods. And that unnaturally moist malted bread which had a texture no different to the filling, it was divinity in his mouth. This was by far the most transcendental sandwich Asiimov had ever put in his mouth.