Brown sauce on bacon sarnies please, particularly if you’re over the age of ten - Ian McMillan

Sometimes a week feels like it’s been bookended by something that makes it memorable; it could be that on the Monday you lost a set of keys and on the Friday you found them again in the last place you thought to look.

Or maybe you saw somebody you hadn’t seen for ages at the start of the week and then you saw them again, in a completely different location, at the other end of the week.

A bookending event happened to me and my mate the fantastic artist Patrick Murphy (you’ll have seen his marvellous horse sculpture at Elsecar on the front page of the Yorkshire Post recently) the other week, and as bookends go these were edible ones, though not always that tasty. I’ll explain.

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Patrick and I have been collaborating on a project for this autumn’s Festival of the Mind in Sheffield and we had a meeting on a Monday not long ago in that fair city with some other participants and so of course the best place to meet was in a café because those espressos are guaranteed to get the ideas flowing.

Should bacon sandwiches have brown or red sauce on? Photo credit: Anthony Devlin/PA WireShould bacon sandwiches have brown or red sauce on? Photo credit: Anthony Devlin/PA Wire
Should bacon sandwiches have brown or red sauce on? Photo credit: Anthony Devlin/PA Wire

All that talking and thinking had made Patrick and I hungry and so we ordered bacon sarnies to help the ideas along and (and here you may want to sit down and take a deep breath) I’m amazed to report that the sarnies came with red sauce already on, spread on the bread like butter.

I know: unbelievable, isn’t it? You can feel the walls of civilisation beginning to crumble.

Suddenly Patrick and I were detached from the meeting, somehow floating above it as though the red sauce was a kind of near-death experience, which in some metaphorical way it was.

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On a practical level, we tried to pick the bacon from the sarnie and somehow shake the red sauce off.

Patrick and I are both of the same mind: Brown sauce on bacon sarnies please, particularly if you’re over the age of ten. The problem was that the red sauce flavoured the rest of the meeting, derailing the serious talk because we kept mentioning the red sauce.

I seemed to see thought bubbles above the heads of the other people in the meeting containing the words I WISH THEY WOULD SHUT UP ABOUT THE RED SAUCE.

On the Friday of that week Patrick and I met up again, this time in Darfield (home of brown sauce on, well, everything) to have our photographs taken for a different poemy/arty project and because the photoshoot was happening at midday I decided to provide us with pork pies.

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Some photos were taken; we looked moody and thoughtful in Darfield Churchyard, like an alt-folk duo on the cover of their second album.

Then we went to the beautiful pavilion of Darfield Bowling Club to have some interior shots done and the photographer decided to feature the pork pies and the crumbs that were left after we’d chomped them.

Patrick and I munched photogenically and the crumbs on the plates looked both poetic and artistic. Outside a game of bowls was happening; it felt like a perfect early summer’s day. I felt that I was achieving a kind of closure.

The week began with an uncomfortable moment in a café in Sheffield; it ended with a sublime time around a table in a bowling club in Darfield.

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Somehow the red sauce had been exorcised by the pork pies. As bookends go, it was pretty perfect.

Except there was no brown sauce in the bowling club. The pork pies were naked. Still, you can’t have everything, can you?

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