Alexei Sayle's Imaginary Sandwich Bar by Alexei Sayle

Author:Alexei Sayle
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408895849
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2017-09-12T10:52:45+00:00

Chapter Three

PROFESSIONAL WOMAN, MID-THIRTIES

When you are doing publicity for a book or a radio series, one of your tasks is to answer questionnaires in newspapers and magazines. These have names such as ‘A Day in the Life’, ‘Five Minutes With. . .’ or ‘My London’ and the answers are often given over the phone. Over the years I have, perhaps mistakenly, tried to be funny in these questionnaires. This is from the Telegraph a few years ago:

Question: Which of your possessions would you be unable to live without?

To which I’ve replied: My kidney dialysis machine.

Then question: How would you describe yourself in a Lonely Hearts column?

And I’ve said: Professional woman, mid-thirties, interested in being taken to all-you-can-eat buffets in the West Midlands area.

Question: Do you believe people can achieve anything if they set their minds to it?

Answer: No, you can’t even get somebody to take you to an all-you-can-eat buffet in the West Midlands area, no matter how hard you try.

Question: What's the best way to mend a broken heart?

Answer: Taking a nice, slightly hairy professional woman to an all-you-can-eat buffet in the West Midlands area.

There was one of those questionnaires I did for the London Evening Standard and I was asked: How do you escape?

And again trying to be funny I replied: I knot some sheets together and I climb out the window.

However, when the piece was printed they’d changed the question to: How do you chill out?

One of the standard enquiries they make around Christmas time is: What is your New Year’s resolution? I always reply: United Nations Resolution 242, the one that calls for a homeland for the Palestinian people. I sense the poor intern on the other end of the line rolling their eyes as I say this.

There is a story I heard about the British ambassador in Washington in the 1980s. On Christmas Eve he was rung by a TV station and asked what he’d like for Christmas. Worried about bribery and corruption and accepting gifts from a foreign TV network, he replied, ‘Ooh, um, er. . . just a small box of chocolates.’ On Christmas Day the ambassador was watching the news and at the end of the main TV bulletin the newsreader said, ‘And finally we asked the ambassadors of several countries what they wanted for Christmas. The French ambassador said world peace, the Soviet ambassador said an end to hunger and the British ambassador said a small box of chocolates. . .’

But making a New Year’s resolution is something I have intermittently tried to do. The resolution I have adhered to the most over the decades since I made it in the 1990s is to wave at more people. I am a big fan of waving. I was first introduced to waving by my father. As a child waiting on a railway platform with my dad I’d be urged to wave at the train guard of any express or freight train that went past. The first hint of the complexities of adult

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