Parallel universes
Lately, Twitter’s search function doesn’t find anything.
There was a very important tweet where I talked about the Mercadona’s Queso Fundido Sandwich, Hacendado brand, supplied by Entrepinares.
In the tweet, I explained that this was a deplorable cheese that was not even real cheese, composed of suspicious substances and with a disgusting taste in any culinary use, EXCEPT in the classic ham and cheese sandwich pan-toasted with butter, known as bikini in Barcelona, mixto in the rest of Spain: sándwich, by the way, in all cases — never the Spanish word emparedado, which the teachers of the Spanish language claimed for decades, but which nobody has ever used, apart from the Mexican dubbing of Scooby-Doo televised in Spain in the 1980s.
The formula for this sandwich operates with enigmatic precision in its parallel universe.
Overly flavourful hams and excellent cheeses usually ruin the dish. There are very few cheeses suitable for this sandwich, and some of the suitable cheeses are completely inedible outside of this particular sandwich made with the described ingredients and cooked in the described way — simply not heating the sandwich in a pan with butter is enough to make both the cheese and the sandwich repugnant.
What made me think about this curious phenomenon again was seeing Lamine Yamal on television a little while ago. Football unfolds like a parallel world, much like the sándwich mixto; it’s like a ham and cheese sandwich pan-toasted with butter, and Lamine Yamal is like the cheese from Mercadona.
There are certain great players (very few, indeed: Michael Laudrup, Roberto Baggio, Futre, Figo…) who possess great qualities without paradox or conflict: they have everything and that’s all.
There are other great players, like Messi, who are unpleasant to watch both on and off the football field: their presence annoys in general, as do their hunchback and moves on the pitch — mechanical, like a video game, even on the rare occasions when their moves reproduce attractive and talented ideas.
And there is a third type of great players, including Maradona or Lamine Yamal, who are aesthetically and emotionally ugly in general, but their presence is beautiful, pleasant to behold on the parallel universe of the football field, like the parallel cheese in a ham and cheese sandwich pan-toasted with butter.