Miss Smith
The company I used to work for didn’t have it’s own canteen (although we did have use of the British Medical Association one next door) so we had a ‘Sandwich Lady’ who’d turn up on her bike with a trailer behind it and then come round our office selling her wares.

They were actually pretty good, so I’d eat them at least twice a week when I didn’t have time to go over to the BMA.

Then, one night, I was sat at home watching BBC2 at a time when they were running a series of short documentaries called ‘Mrs Smith’. 10 minute short films about women called, funnily enough ‘Smith’.

They had one about the dead ex-labour leaders wife, one about Dame Maggie Smith (if I recall correctly) and a few about ‘normal’ Mrs Smiths.

The one I happened to catch that night featured our Sandwich lady. Which I thought was quite exciting, so I sat down to watch it.

It showed her making Sandwiches in her kitchen and putting them in the fridge over night.

Then it started to discuss her ‘art’.

She did the sandwich thing to allow her to concentrate on her ‘real’ work. Her art.

Fine, nothing wrong with that.

Until it started discussing her latest piece.

They showed a white bath.

It had a series of three tide marks running round it. Getting progressively darker the lower down the bath they were.

She said ‘I think they are beautiful, they look like mountains on the horizon, they take me out of the city and make me feel I am in the middle of nowhere’.

‘And how do you make them?’

‘Well, basically, I went a month without washing, then took a bath, then I went two months and took another bath with less water in it, then three months and did the same. In a couple of weeks time it be four months since I last bathed and I will add another one’.

Funnily enough, she didn’t sell any sandwiches in our office the next day and we never saw her again after that.
( scarpe We Stole Bikes, Fri 31 Oct 2008, 10:40, Reply)