Fundamentals 2: The Yoga 'Sandwich'

When I was about 7 years old, or there abouts, my mother (a freelance Yoga teacher), would put on children's Yoga classes in our spacious living room which I would attend. These Yoga classes were, as far as I remember, great fun, and, while we did partake in the discipline of Yoga, fun was the main ingredient, with plenty of laughing and messing about.

An important part of the ritual of these events was a post-Yoga communal experience always involving Ribena from a jug and a large plate of bread and butter- brown bread, and I cannot quite remember what form of butter-spread it was, but I suspect it was butter, although it is possible that it was margarine, or an olive based equivalent (I cannot remember at what point in history the olive oil based spread became common place).

At any rate the brown bread and butter with Ribena was wonderfully satisfying, the memory of it remains with me to this day, as part of the total experience.

To suggest that brown bread with butter is a Sandwich is of course heretical to the previously fundamental '3 structure' of 'BFB'. Indeed I would still argue that bread and butter is not strictly, or perhaps at all, a Sandwich. But it is certainly within the family of the Sandwich, and I feel it necessary to bring it to the reader's attention at this early stage, as there is something wonderfully fundamental, underlying, about the 'B&B', 2 stroke, structure. It is perhaps best classified as a proto-Sandwich, rather than Sandwich proper.

I would though argue, in conclusion, that the B&B Proto-Sandwich was in fact part of a wider 3 part experience structure- of Yoga, Ribena and B&B Proto-Sandwich; take any of those parts away and the whole thing crumbles.

There is of course one final ingredient that held it all together- Love. However, I would not include this ingredient in the experience structure, rendering a 4 part structure; as any Sandwich lover knows Love is the crucial ingredient in any great Sandwich, but to include it in the formal structure would be like including the Kitchen, the Maker and every important background agent. Any Sandwich though made without Love, as anyone who has been to Pret A Manger can testify, is irrevocably inferior to one with Love in it, regardless of the other ingredients.

Having said this I am of course not a 'Love fundamentalist'. It is perfectly possible to have a crap Sandwich made with Love, it is just not possible to have a great Sandwich made without it, or at least that Love adds something qualitatively extra, and special, whatever the material basis of the Sandwich itself.