I set off at 06.29 from Yate feeling faintly pleased with myself, which should always be taken as a warning. The sort of quiet, early-morning competence where you’ve packed your own food, checked the connections, and briefly imagine you’ve got life broadly under control.
The plan involved a proper butty. Latvian rye, the dense, slightly argumentative sort of bread that doesn’t collapse under pressure. Vintage cheddar with a bit of bite. Mrs Bridges chutney doing its usual job of keeping everything civilised. I’d even packed a square of chocolate, which felt like overachievement.
Changed at Gloucester without incident, which only reinforced the dangerous optimism. Sat down at 07.30, train moving, countryside sliding past in that grey, slightly apologetic way it has at that hour, and did what any modern traveller does - streamed YouTube straight into my ears via Bluetooth hearing aids.
There’s something faintly absurd about that in itself. Years ago, hearing aids were beige, whistled occasionally, and existed purely to make conversations in draughty rooms slightly less mysterious. Now they’re effectively a discreet media centre. One moment you’re a retired chap on an early train, the next you’re wirelessly plugged into political philosophy and 1970s rock production.
So I had a bit of Vlad Vexler, thoughtfully unpacking the deeper meaning of Melania’s film, which he suggests is less a portrait and more a rather elegant side swipe at Trump, which I nodded along to as though I were contributing something. Then the making of Smells Like Teen Spirit, all earnest recollections and slightly worn denim. Then the making of Stairway to Heaven, which is essentially a documentary about how long one can spend adjusting a microphone before achieving transcendence.
By this point I was in quite an elevated state. Politics, culture, art, the human condition. The sort of mental atmosphere in which a well-constructed sandwich feels entirely appropriate. A small, edible conclusion to a series of serious thoughts.
Hearing aids still quietly doing their thing. Box out. Quiet moment of anticipation.
Opened it.
Prosciutto.
Not in a sandwich. Not even pretending to be heading in that direction. Just a box of it. A rather large quantity, as though I were about to cater for a small wedding, or possibly a wolf.
Now, prosciutto is all very well. No complaints about the pig involved. But on its own it has the structural integrity of damp tissue paper and the emotional range of a side character. It needs something to lean on. Bread, at the very least. Cheese, ideally. A bit of chutney to stop it becoming self-important.
Which is when it dawns on me that what I was actually meant to be eating was, in its own modest way, a sort of Stairway to Cheddar. Layers, structure, a gradual build to something satisfying, each component doing its part without fuss.
Instead, there I am, fresh from an hour of cultural and philosophical enrichment, streaming directly into my skull like some sort of modest cyborg, eating slices of ham out of a plastic box like a slightly confused aristocrat who’s taken a wrong turn and ended up on Great Western Railway.
There’s no dignity in it. A butty has edges. It can be held, bitten, managed. This is just ongoing. You peel off a bit, it folds in on itself, you try again, and before long you’ve eaten what is essentially half a leg of pork and still feel you haven’t had breakfast.
Meanwhile, somewhere at home, the actual sandwich is sitting there in its box, fully assembled, perfectly balanced, doing exactly what it was designed to do. Bread holding things together. Cheese providing substance. Chutney offering a bit of perspective. The whole thing quietly smug.
And that, really, is the point. We spend a lot of time congratulating ourselves on preparation. Systems, planning, getting ahead of the game. We stream clever people directly into our ears, we nod along, we feel informed.
And then it turns out we’ve simply picked up the wrong container.
You can call it human error if you like. I’d call it a design flaw in identical plastic boxes.
Anyway, I’m now somewhere north of Gloucester, slightly underfed, faintly greasy, faintly more technologically advanced than I strictly need to be, and contemplating whether to buy a coffee that tastes of burnt optimism and a pastry that claims to be artisanal but will, in all likelihood, dissolve into disappointment.
Smells Like Pensioner Disappointment, really.
