I was sitting in a café chatting to my friend Russ, we’d arranged to meet - as we do sometimes - on a day when we were both in the same town. It doesn’t happen often. Which is probably just as well.
“I might be back in about six weeks,” said Russ, managing my expectations.
We’ve been friends for about 25 years, although we didn’t see much of each other for most of that time. This is a pattern I find with lots of my friends, they seem to put up with me best if I’m at a distance. Or infrequent.
Our food arrived - for Russ some sort of all day breakfast, for me, poached eggs on toast with smashed avocado.
I took a swig of my tea, I’d come directly from a coffee morning which might just save the world, and now needed to keep the caffeine topped up. I looked at the avocado, and prodded it with a fork.
“It’s incredibly creamy, it looks as though it’s been whipped,” I said, adding: “I suspect that a machine has done this - mechanically recovered avocado.” I imagined the café receiving tubs and tubs of pulped avocado, and felt slightly put off.
“It’s not exactly artisanal,” I said.
“I bought an avocado at the weekend,” said Russ, “for my sandwiches. But it won’t mash - I’ve had to slice it.”
“You bought one that was too hard,” I said.
“It specifically said on the sticker: ‘ripe and ready,’” he replied.
We let that sink in for a minute.
“Next week is lemon chicken,” he continued, “then after that it’s…”
“What do you mean?” I interrupted. He went on to explain that he has a twelve week cycle of sandwich fillings - developed over a series of years - he can list them all, in order.
“Will you add any more?” I asked.
“No. I always wanted to get to twelve,” he said.
“So, you basically only have the same sandwiches once a quarter? Extraordinary… how did it start?”
“Well, it started with ham and day release bread - I was…”
“Sorry, what’s ‘day release bread’?”
He fixed me with a stare.
“Dairy-lea-spread,” he repeated, slowly - as if to a child.
“Ohhhhh….” I said.
“Russ has a twelve week sandwich rotation,” I told my wife, later that day. “He has it all planned out, he can tell what he’s going to have in his sandwich for any given week - I suppose for years in advance.” I began to think of questions I should have asked - like ‘is there any seasonal variation?’
“You two really get into the deep stuff, don’t you,” she said.
“That wasn’t our only topic of conversation,” I replied, feeling a little aggrieved. “We talked about all kinds of things. Important things.” The conversation had, indeed, ranged beyond sandwich fillings. It had included wizards, joke writing and a game called ‘donkey or tank?’ Sometimes we talk about clowns, but not on this occasion.
“And yet, the one thing you thought to mention when you came home was the sandwich fillings,” she said.
“Ah,” I said, “that’s because of the day release bread.”
“Dairy-lea-spread?” She replied.
This is the first outing for my new ‘Saturday columns’ - short, funny, basically true* stories of mundanity and mishaps from my life. There’s not supposed to be any point to them. But they might make you smile. Bear with me if I don’t manage every Saturday straight away, I’m working on it.
*Some names, locations and other details may have been changed to protect the guilty.
I'll never look at Dairy Lea Spread in the same way again :-))