At Christmas everything here froze over: no post, no horse trams, no people. The whole of London was eating pudding and singing:

This deliberate merrymaking, conscientiously timed for the 25th, was very tedious, which is why I was genuinely delighted to get the opportunity on the third day of Christmas to visit a sandwich dinner.

A sandwich is, basically, bread and butter. But in London slang, this word is used to designate special people who, like bread with butter, are covered with boards for pasting bills. These boards are attached to an iron ring through which the sandwich men put their heads. A third board is attached to the same ring on little metal mounts and placed above the sandwich man's head. All of this is extremely cumbersome, unwieldy and, above all, unnecessary, since all the pavements, house walls, omnibuses and restaurant tablecloths have already been appropriated by advertisers. But the same hidebound resistance to change that prompts the English to install door hammers when there are electric bells, to use wooden staircases when fires and the costliness of wood might have suggested to them the idea of iron ones – that same resistance daily makes them saddle this unnecessary yoke on the necks of many thousands of people.

I could never look at these toilers without pain. They walk past in a long file, one after another, with a slow, funereal pace. They cannot stand still, they must forever keep moving, forever keep shoving their boards in the faces of passers-by. The ring weighs down the shoulders, the head keeps jerking, there is no possibility of straightening out or taking any rest throughout the whole day. But the main torment is the humiliating incongruity between the placard-bearer and his placard.

A poster depicts lavish delicacies from a fashionable restaurant – while the sandwich man is hungry and gaunt.

A poster proclaims the virtue of the excellent Peter Robinson lacquered boots – while the sandwich man sports on his feet some kind of sieve instead of shoes. A poster reminds us that The Merry Wives of Windsor is on today at the Garrick Theatre – the sandwich man is sullen, wretched, and the word ‘merry’ on his poster seems like a cruel mockery.