I’ve been in Fleet Street for 35 years. It’s changed. Used to have newspapers and lawyers, back in the day, now it has lawyers and lawyers. And bankers. Accountants have always been there too but you generally don’t notice them as they skulk around bookishly. The only remaining newspaper thing there is the Dundee Courier, as just a kind of museum to the old days. Every regional newspaper used to have an office in Fleet Street when it was ‘News Central’ but then someone invented the telephone and they realised it wasn’t necessary any longer to have an actual presence in the place where all the newspapers were printed. So Maggie and Rupert Murdoch moved the papers out. Breaking the incredibly powerful unions whilst doing so.

There are few of us left from those days. An endangered species. Because the retail equivalent of ‘global warming’ arrived in the form of the internet, the phone shops and the coffee shop chains.

Once upon a time there were 10 little sandwich bars in the area. Run by Italians, not just because they were the only people capable of putting some cheese between two slices of bread, but also because they, and they alone, were trusted to make something as exotic and revered as ‘a cappuccino’! Which came in little styrofoam cups, which can still be found inside every fish in the oceans.

But the Starbucks and the Prets (the Pret office was in Fleet Street when they started, Julian Metcalfe was a regular visitor) soon presented a more sanitised, sterilised, corporate way of dispensing food and one by one the little sandwich bars folded. And now we have just one. The last survivor. MY sandwich bar. But not just a mere survivor, the veritable Tyrannosaurus rex of sandwich bars. (I know, they became extinct too, but there’s no guarantees in life… or death). It’s called De Lieto. After the first owner, funny enough.

Starbucks and Pret are always busy, generally with people nursing a glass of water whilst spending 4 hours on the free WiFi. Others drift in and out buying their near-frozen, pre-prepared, steri-packs of fairly tasteless food with the nutritional values stamped on the pack.

The queue for De Lieto starts at about 11.30 and lasts, pretty much 30 to 40 strong, until about 2. Before that they are preparing for the vast number of deliveries they do every day, all custom orders (hold the butter; two with beef and horseradish, three with mango and aardvark), to all the law offices, courtrooms and barristers’ chambers.

They offer 20 different types of bread and rolls and a million ways to fill ‘em. And most importantly, they’re lovely lovely people who know your name and charge you less for a feast than Pret do for egg’n’cress-on-white.

I intended to write about the benefits of certain types of carbs, but got carried away. So for today you can still eat what you like. Only today.

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx