THE ANSWER IS AN EGG SANDWICH is a collection of thirty-eight pieces. Some are written purely from the point of view of humour, often in unexpected situations. Others are more thoughtful and reflective, and look at some bigger questions, like racial prejudice, consultants in the business world, the pace of technological development, policing, and social life in the former Soviet societies. See also the CONTENTS section. This is the introduction in the book itself:

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Not that I have the slightest illusion that anyone would care to read one, but I have no wish to write an autobiography. The individual sketches are indeed autobiographical and are as factually accurate as I can make them, but this is not an autobiography in the true sense.

 

The really important events in my life, like meeting my wife Suki and the birth of our two sons, Edmund and Joseph, together with some darker moments, are not so different from those experienced by many thousands of others, so I haven’t tried to write about these.

 

A couple of my earlier books are nearer to being autobiographies in that I tried to make them as complete as possible about particular periods or aspects of my life.

 

With A Fifties Childhood, my excuse for doing this is that I am (still, just!) possessed of a memory capable of recalling things in close detail. There are now fewer people around who remember the nineties-fifties well. This was why I wanted to record my honest, non-nostalgic impressions of it. Those impressions are necessarily those of a child.

 

With Lightning Strikes Twice, I did my best to write about what it was like to experience two life-threatening brain haemorrhages and, more importantly, how I did my best to recover from the worst of their effects.

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If anyone else gained from my own efforts to record these experiences, even in a small way, I have to be satisfied.

 

Like A Fifties Childhood, the present volume also relies on detailed recall of experiences, this time over a much longer period.

 

Some of these were important to me, like those about my first two visits to Malaysia, during the nineteen-eighties [22 and 24]. Others, like that detailed I in my account of The House in Hanger Lane [7] are trivial, even to me.  

 

My sole criterion has been that the incidents, episodes, or experiences have lodged in my mind. This is often merely because (sometimes only with the benefit of hindsight!) they still amuse me.

Generally, I’ve arranged the individual chapters in loose chronological order. ‘Loose’ is the operative word here. Some of the chapters are focused on a single incident lasting a day or less.

Others cover much longer periods. Time Passes [38] for instance, links events separated in time by over sixty years. For this reason, I have placed it last, thinking it a good balance to the first chapter, The Time Traveller [1].

 

Why use The Answer is an Egg Sandwich as the title for this book? Well, it seemed to me to be less dull to name the volume after the title of one of its constituent chapters than calling it something like ‘Sketches’ would have been.

 

It should be readily obvious from reading it, if not understandable, exactly why I used this title for [15]. Some of the other chapters, although by no means all of them, have their own ‘egg sandwich moment’.

 

I wouldn’t recommend going through this book to identify the ‘egg sandwich moments’ in it, though. The reader will find it far more rewarding to discover his or her own.