Save our cheese sandwiches!

Sad things, cheese sandwiches, especially in their most basic form. Most would add a garnish: pickle, tomato and onion are the most popular. Cowards. The point of a cheese sandwich is its beigeness. This is fuel, not food. Consoling sad corporate workers at their desks. Rows upon rows of sandwiches on Tesco shelves: ‘Cheese – no mayonnaise.’ No mayonnaise is important. That would be too much fun.

Everyone knows how the Earl of Sandwich repurposed bread and beef and started an eating revolution. No one really knows who first put cheese into the mix, however. The first mention seems to be from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Nym refers to a dish of ‘bread and cheese’. It’s hard to tell whether he meant a sandwich, of course. But something feels right about imagining legions of doughy Englishmen chomping on cheese sandwiches for centuries: aboard the Golden Hinde, beside the entrance to the coal mine, sheltering from bombs.