Ian Sansom - Ring Road - There’s no place like home

*Philosophy for Beginners, Week 1, ‘Ethics’.

†Philosophy for Beginners, Week 2, ‘Metaphysics’.

*He certainly did not need Prince’s Lovesexy, he realised, or Deacon Blue’s Raintown, or the Smiths’ World Won’t Listen, or Simple Minds’ Once Upon a Time, or Marillion, or the Fatima Mansions, or Lloyd Cole and the Commotions, or Blue Oyster Cult, or the Cult, or John Cougar Mellencamp’s The Lonesome Jubilee, or Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians’ Shooting Rubber Bands at the Stars, CDs he could not possibly imagine or remember himself ever having wanted or set out to buy, nor any of the dozens of home-made compilation tapes marked simply ‘Various’, or ‘Happy Daze’, or ‘Paul and Keith’s Rave Spesh’, on grubby BASF Chrome Extra II (90), and SONY HF and BHF (90), and red and white TDK D90, and Memorex dBS+, and AGFA F-DXI-90 and featuring almost exclusively the music of James, the Stone Roses, the Wonder Stuff, REM, and the Housemartins, and also, invariably, Primal Scream’s ‘Loaded’, The Farm’s ‘Groovy Train’ and Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine’s ‘Sheriff Fatman’.

A short account of Bob Savory – his life, his times, his knives, his mother, his capacity for self-enriching, self-reproach and his famous bill of fare

The wind would near have knocked you over. It was gale-force. Bob Savory lost two trees in his grounds: an oak that was older even than the house, and a silver birch by the far pond. Bob has grounds and an old house. He has ponds both near and far. Bob is an old friend and, much more than any of the rest of us, Bob has made it. Bob has it all. Bob has trees that are not leylandii. Bob has done what seems so difficult to us, but which seems so natural to him: he has made money.

Bob is a successful local businessman, possibly the most successful local businessman around here since the titled landowners and gentlemen farmers and the great whiskered industrialists of centuries past, when our town used to make all its own and look after itself, when you might be able to sit down in your local after a long day’s work and eat local cheese with your local bread and your local pint in your local tweeds and your local linens round a roaring fire made from the local logs and then nip upstairs to get a good old-fashioned seeing-to and a local disease from a good old local girl, and you’d probably be dead by the time you were forty.

There were reminders of those good old days everywhere when we were growing up, from the big brick warehouses up on Moira Avenue and the polished red granite-fronted offices on High Street, with their huge carved bearded heads over the ornate archways, right down to the hole-in-the-wall boot scrapers and the cast-iron corner bollards and the old drinking fountains at the bottom of Main Street by the Quality Hotel, served by taps in beautiful shell-shaped niches, and the big stone trough for horses, which were all removed for the car park and road-widening scheme years ago, and which no one has seen since – although some people say they now sit as ornaments in the garden of our ex-mayor and council chairman, Frank Gilbey, a man who presided over twenty years of unrestrained and unrestricted planning and development during the last decades of the twentieth century, a man whose name will live on as the mayor who cut the ribbon on the ring road and opened Bloom’s, the mall, and changed for ever the face of our town. Everyone knows the name of Frank Gilbey, a man who owns a chain of hairdressers and lingerie shops throughout the county, and who has a roundabout on the ring road named after him. His name will live on, Councillor Frank Gilbey, while the names of those nineteenth-century giants, the great entrepreneurs and philanthropists of the past, which once were everywhere – Joseph King and Samuel Jelly and James Whisker, written above offices and shops, and given to parks and streets and community halls, and on all our school cups and certificates – are now hidden and obliterated.

Bob Savory’s fame and fortune may not last for ever but for the moment he is rich and famous and successful, an intimate even of Frank Gilbey’s, a business associate, a partner with Frank, in fact, in a number of prestigious developments, a local son to be proud of, and when people ask him what is the secret of his success – which they do, about once a month, in the Impartial Recorder, our local paper, which likes to do its best for local business and for whom Bob is about the closest thing we have to a living, breathing, home-grown celebrity, with all his own hair and an actual jawline – he smiles his big perfect white smile, the result of years of expensive cosmetic dentistry and worth every penny, he says, and he looks straight at the camera and he says just one word: sandwiches.

Sandwiches, sandwiches. White or brown, hot or cold, rolls, baps, tortilla wraps, subs and bagels, croissants, pittas, panini, it really doesn’t matter what to Bob, as long as you can eat it with one hand and the filling doesn’t drip down on to your shirt. So no hot cheese or scrambled egg, and no loose meat, but just about everything else: Brie, bacon and avocado, turkey and ham, egg and onion, tuna and onion, tuna and anything, all-day breakfasts, double – and triple-deckers, roast beef and horseradish, roast vegetables and mozzarella, chicken and prawn and cold sausage, every imaginable combination of cheese and meat and bread, smothered in every kind of mayo and mustard and sauce known to man, and some unknown, some made to a secret recipe known, they say, only to Bob, and handed down from generation to generation. Bob knows everything there is to know about sandwiches. He is our sandwich king, the prince, the lord, our contemporary Earl of Sandwich. When it comes to sandwiches Bob just seems to know what people like. He has a sixth sense. He has an instinct. *

I can remember when Bob was just getting into the catering business, or at least had gone into a restaurant and got himself a job, which is perhaps not quite the same thing, but it was a pretty big deal around here and in retrospect it was clearly the beginning of great things for Bob Savory.

Most of us when we left school had ambitions only to get out of town and maybe go to London, to Soho, to get to see inside a sex shop, visit some record shops, and maybe get a place of our own with a few lifelong friends and be able to stay up all night, drinking and listening to loud music, and meeting girls we hadn’t been to school with, girls who maybe worked in the sex shops, or who, like us, were just in browsing and who weren’t going to be afraid to explore their sexuality. But when it came to it we were content to end up working at the local garage, or on the sites, or going on to the Tech if we had the grades, and living with our parents until they kicked us out, and marrying the sister of a friend, and losing touch with our ambitions and our record collections, but Bob always had a firm plan and a purpose, right from an early age, and he never changed his mind and he never got distracted.

I remember seeing him the day he’d just bought his first set of knives and the look on his face, when he unwrapped them in the pub, to let us all admire: it was the look of a man who knew where he was going in life. It was the look of a man with a sharp knife in his hand and the future before him like a lamb to the slaughter. Bob’s knives were not like the knives our mothers had at home. Bob’s were German knives, made from high-carbon steel, with three beautiful silver rivets in the handles, not like they were ordinary rivets just holding the thing together, but like they were meant to be there, like they had been ordained, three perfect eternal rings, and Bob sat with us in the Castle Arms on the red velour, with these six-and ten-inch blades, and he rolled up his sleeves and he raised his hands, like the priest with the host, and he balanced the knives on his middle finger, one by one, and they perched there, like beautiful shiny birds come down to rest. They’d cost him his first month’s wages and then some, but he was as proud as you would be if you’d just met the woman of your dreams, and he handled those blades with exactly the same kind of care and attention, gazing at them fondly, and perhaps a little shyly, imagining their future life together. Bob told us you could get all sorts of different knives, knives of every size and for every purpose. He said there was even a knife called a tomato knife, for cutting tomatoes, and of course none of us had ever even heard of such a thing as a tomato knife, and we laughed at him and joked about all the other knives he should get: how about an egg knife, we said, where’s your cucumber knife, Bob, and your lettuce knife, and your knife for the cutting of toasted ham and cheese sandwiches, huh, and he rolled up his knives, in this brand-new beautiful thick green roll of material, and tied them up with their new strings, and we never saw them again, and that night we went back to our parents’ houses with their plastic-handled cutlery and tried to balance bread knives on our fingers.