The Bacon Sandwich Dilemma
and trying to find a way to say "Sorry"...
Many years ago, when I lived in Bristol, my job used to require me to regularly drive to Horsham in West Sussex for a couple of days of meetings. Some 130 miles apart, I used to be away early in the morning aiming to get to my destination by about 9 a.m.
Just outside Horsham on the route I took there was a lay-by with one of those ‘pop-up’ mobile cafés serving breakfast and coffee, and as I got closer to the office I often used to debate whether or not I should stop. After a while it occurred to me that whether I did or not could potentially alter the rest of my life: I would get to work at a different time, meet people in a different sequence, have different conversations.
I named this “The Bacon Sandwich Dilemma”.
In a way it was no more than a recognition of the pivotal moments - most of them seemingly insignificant - that we face just about every minute of every day throughout our lives: should I do this or that? say this or that? Billions of inflection points.
Around about the same time - it was over thirty years ago now - in ending an embryonic relationship in the cruelest and most cowardly fashion, I did the one and only truly despicable thing I think I have ever done to someone.
Was ending the relationship the wrong choice? Possibly not. But the manner of my withdrawal was unforgivable. Ever since then I have wanted to apologise, to be able to go back and somehow make amends - even make a different decision, who knows? Most often the angst I feel about this episode hits me early in the morning during that hazy period between sleeping and waking - and when it does it usually forces me to wake. Just as it has this morning.
Looking back, you might say the ending of that friendship was one of those ‘Bacon Sandwich moments’.
I wonder if, as writers, our relationship to such inflection points is at odds with the majority of people (though of course I can’t possibly know, given I’m only me). Considering what we do, do we feel we have an ability to revisit and relive or change such episodes through our writing? Although it is obviously the case that we cannot actually go back and make a different choice - or indeed say “sorry” - does our writing, in a somewhat unlikely and nebulous way, allow us to ‘time travel’? Or to believe we can?
And if it did, to how many events might we return?
I have always been fascinated by our relationship to our past lives; indeed, it is a major theme for much of my long fiction: people revisiting history, unpicking it, trying to understand it, trying to come to terms with the implications of the decisions taken in those ‘bacon sandwich moments’.
In this particular instance I would simply like to be able to say “Sorry”. And I say that knowing the only way I am now able - and achieve closure, who knows? - will be to fictionalise the episode in a story and do so there…