As I was making myself a bacon sandwich this morning, I decided to forego my usual accompaniment of HP Sauce and instead garnish it with a generous dollop of Heinz Tomato Ketchup. And, in doing so, I came to the realisation that our minds make curious associations between things that are seemingly not directly related, but which have one single point of reference tying them together.
The use of tomato ketchup on sandwiches, for example. It is not my default approach, because I grew up in a household where bottles of HP Sauce were devoured on a regular basis. HP Sauce went in stews, casseroles and cottage pies; it accompanied any sort of fried breakfast; it was the standard addition to most sandwiches regardless of whether they contained ham, cheese, bacon, sausages or pretty much anything else. It was, in short, our family sauce. So to speak. Actually, I retract that statement because it sounds all kinds of wrong.
Anyway, I have nothing against tomato ketchup. I actually rather like it on a sandwich — sometimes I'm just in the mood for it. But it always feels like I'm doing something "different" when I reach for the ketchup instead of the HP Sauce. And this all comes down to one of these tenuous associations.
When I was a kid, I had a friend called Matthew. In Matthew's household, the default accompaniment to sandwiches was, you guessed it, tomato ketchup. Day in, day out at primary school, I'd see him pull out his sandwiches that were inevitably ham and ketchup. I came to associate the phenomenon of ketchup-on-sandwiches with him — emphasised by the fact that any time I went to visit his house at a time of day when the consumption of sandwiches would have been appropriate, they inevitably contained ketchup.
I somewhat lost contact with Matthew after he became a bit of a penis in secondary school, and fell in with a new group of friends. And yet here I am, many, many years later, and putting ketchup on a bacon sandwich still makes me think of fond memories from when I was, like, seven or something. Ham and ketchup sandwiches, Revs on the BBC Micro, being slightly scared of his dog Poppy.
My brain is full of this absolute garbage. But can I remember to put the bins out every Wednesday night? Can I bollocks.
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