For the last three years I’ve used January to try and learn something new. Three years ago it was to try 31 days of exercise, two years ago it was 31 days of stretching, last year it was 31 days of learning to play the piano and this year it’s 31 days of… lunch.

What is a sandwich? Does it have to have bread? But what about rolls? Or wraps? Are they sandwiches?

According to the Oxford English Dictionary a sandwich is:

“an item of food consisting of two pieces of bread with a filling between them, eaten as a light meal.”

I like the use of the phase “eaten as a light meal”.

First, it suggests that a sandwich eaten as a substantial meal, perhaps by swapping out ham with an entire roasted pig, is not a sandwich. You can have too much sandwich to be a sandwich.

Second, it does need to be eaten too. Making a sandwich for fun or art or as a prop is not a sandwich. So, when Patrick Stewart starred in MacBeth and made a sandwich halfway through the performance, was it a sandwich if it was made for a sonnet and not lunch?

Today, I ask this question as I had a sandwich consisting of last night’s left over guacamole (made with avocado, chilli, tomatoes and limes) and some savoury biscuits found in the cupboard. While I realise this was not a conventional sandwich, it did have two ‘sides’ and a filling so met the basic visual image of a sandwich. I also ate it and didn’t use it to murder Duncan in his sleep.

Bread: a very dense form of bread, called a butter biscuit…

Filling: homemade guacamole.

Taste: The biscuit made a better scoop than a traditional tortilla chip and the guacamole was still tasty despite a night in the fridge. I give this an improvised 8.5/10.