THE LEBANESE BAKERY

I was ‘in office’ again yesterday - not for any specific reason other than needing to be around people. And by people, it turned out I meant three people, who are all very quiet, and very clever.

I drove this time. It’s not a pleasant commute to Oxford. Ten minutes of motorway, forty minutes or so of the A34 and then needling around petrol stations and confusing road signs. Everyone was in some sort of massive hurry yesterday - a kind of collective grouch settling on the roads, weighing down the tyres, the metal, the concrete, like heavy blocks of despair. I got honked at a few times. I nearly crashed twice. Never mind.

12pm. Pedro, tallest of the three, swung his chair round and whipped off his headphones.

“Shall we do lunch?” he beamed with a hint of Brazilian flare. He’d been working away to himself, tapping and humming for what must have been several hours.

“Sure!” I said. Anand agreed. Moments later, the three of us were striding down the street, in search of the local Lebanese bakery.

“You’ve been here before?” I asked, carefully.

“Oh! Many times!” They said. Anand, the kind of chap for whom exaggeration would be rare, said the food was ‘good’ and that he ‘liked it’ while Pedro enthused about the cuisine of the Levant in general, in a way that I thought was encouraging.

I had never been to a Lebanese bakery before. In my provincial English manner, I sort of expected it to be food I had never had the wit to enjoy - spices and flavours, hot, dry falafel and kebabs - I didn’t think it would be my kind of thing, but I was, I admitted, willing to give it a try.

-

“Yes, what do you want please?” said the gruff olive-skinned man behind the glass counter. He had white hair, a square jaw, and eyes that were like beady black buttons. He wore a green t-shirt, covered by a thick, ivory coloured apron, and he was taking no nonsense.

On Anand’s advice then, I quickly chose the chicken shawarma sandwich. It went under the grill while my two colleagues ordered. Moments later it was wrapped in crisp white paper, stashed inside a coat pocket, and on the way back to the office.

-

Now. I cannot describe the chicken shawarma sandwich. I’ll try, but the problem is that I feel as though my limited vocabulary is buffeting up against thousands of years of evolution - slamming into a recipe so old, so carefully preserved, so extraordinary, that my Twenty First Century waffle-words bounce off it like blunted arrows from a sprawling cedar.

Nevertheless, the sandwich was simply, the BEST sandwich I think I’ve EVER tasted. The chicken, the lemon, the herbs, the hint of spice, the garlic, the sauce, the mystery, the magic! Wrapped up in a pastry so delicate but crunchy - so tasty and so light that it could only have been made out of wonder and of joy.

It was incredible. I thought of the man in the bakery, dolefully dishing out these slices of afterlife, surly and straight, focused and intent, grounded in earth. What was his secret? How could a delight like that have come from such grisly hands? But there it was. The miracle Lebanese sandwich.

Anand was neither impressed nor repelled by my effervescence for the chicken shawarma sandwich. He remained cool and calm about it. Pedro knowingly smiled, as though I’d just caught onto something, and was secretly pleased - or perhaps bemused that (obviously) the food everywhere else in the world is better than English fare and so this discovery was something like a man stepping out of the muddy river onto a frozen bank with no idea that there are such things as warm houses and soup.

I, overawed still, said it was like history had gathered all the ingredients that work together and combined them into one glorious moment. Unlike my more placid friends, it seemed I was prone to hyperbole.

I thought about that sandwich on the way home. If I go back, what would it be like a second time? Was it a one-off? What about the rest of the menu? What of the kibbe or the hommos or the labneh? And isn’t it joyful that there’s a new world of things to try?

The A34 stretched ahead of me. The traffic rushed past at an average that was clearly higher than the speed limit. I didn’t. Everyone’s in such a hurry these days, aren’t they? Everyone trying to get somewhere, trying to get home, trying to get ahead, trying to pursue the next thing. Why so? There’s so much out there, so much in the slowness of time, the collision of ingredients that wisdom passed down through generations! So much joy you could miss if you blink.

I got beeped at the roundabout. I didn’t mind. I’d been daydreaming about a sandwich. A chicken shawarma sandwich.