LAST UPDATE | 23 hrs ago

THERE WAS ONE day in second class when my teacher held me back from going out to the yard, sending everyone else out ahead of me.

Now, if you didn’t go to an Irish primary school I am going to find it very difficult to accurately explain the feeling of self-importance that ignites every single cell in the body of a 7-year-old child when their teacher wants to speak to them, and only them, but I imagine it’s something close to what Mary felt when she was visited by the angel.

Anyway, once everyone had left the room, the teacher explained that she had noticed I wasn’t eating my lunches at break time, and wanted to know if I was okay. I couldn’t bring myself to say that the little prayer we said every day before lunch turned my stomach. You know the one, of course you do, it has that one line about ‘blessing the hands that made the food’, and that made me think about hands touching my food.

Then I would think about all of the hands that did touch my food during both the preparation and distribution of the sandwich process, and I would wonder what else those hands touched before touching my food. Every day, I would reach a point where I would rather have eaten glass than taken a single bite of that sandwich. Even now, decades later, a sticker saying ‘handmade’ on food will spark my gag reflex. I just can’t trust a sandwich that has been on a journey.

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

I don’t know what that teacher thought of my silence, but she reached into her bag and produced a Snickers. A full-sized one, which was a rare sight in a 90s lunchbox. She said that if I ate half of my sandwich, I could have the bar. 

My mind immediately raced to an image of me swaggering out to the yard holding the........

© TheJournal