So what’s your theory about the Magdeburg sandwich thrower? Just in case you haven’t yet encountered this mystery for the ages, a phantom chucker of tinfoil-wrapped sausage, cheese and salami frühstücksbrötchen (breakfast rolls, a German thing presumably, and I can’t say I hate it) has been, well … not terrorising, but perhaps intriguing or mildly irritating residents along the B184 in the Saxony-Anhalt region of Germany.
A picture in the newspaper of local football club manager Holger Becker down on one knee, holding out some crumpled foil in which a worthy-looking brown crust is visible, as if proposing to the viewer with it, is a sublime addition to the canon of angry people in local news pointing at stuff.
The search for meaning has been powerful and poignant. The sandwiches – some bitten, some untouched – are thrown only on weekdays before 6am. Might they represent a cathartic gesture of revolt against capitalism, the grind, or gluten? Are they expressing anger, or rejecting German values?
Psychologist Anke Precht told a newspaper that the sandwich fly-tipping could be the result of a “missed moment” for candour in a relationship, which has resulted in a need for ongoing duplicity. Perhaps, the theory goes, the thrower doesn’t like breakfast bröte but mistakenly gave their partner the impression they do, and having left it too late to tell the truth has hit on this solution? This stuff happens. I told my future husband I liked clubbing on our first date to try to sound edgy, then had to go clubbing repeatedly for a miserable year, both of us feigning enjoyment. But why the drama, when chucking it in the office bin would do the job? No, there’s a defiant, performative element here – a desire to be unmasked.
But is “why” the right question? Searching for meaning and constructing a narrative around events is what makes us human, sure, but it’s part Fortean Times, part-Ripley’s Believe It Or Not! out there right now. In the last week, I’ve read about a Florida man trying to cross the Atlantic in a hamster wheel, a dead nun who has remained perfectly preserved for four years in Missouri, and Mexico senate hearings into extraterrestrial life examining “ancient aliens” that look like something you could buy from a head shop in Camden Market in London.
We will wear ourselves out trying to understand it all: is the mystery totem pole on the Kent coast a pagan symbol or an art project, or is it invoking divine protection for nesting birds? Has a Chinese zoo replaced its sun bear with a person in a bear suit (tell me you haven’t zoomed in on its wrinkly arse and wondered) to draw curious crowds? Is the mysterious “skin-like” golden orb found in the sea floor off Alaska an alien pod?
And that’s only the stuff that doesn’t matter (I’ll regret saying that when orb flu comes for me next year). What about the things that are bogglingly weird but important? The former US president keeping classified documents in his (hideous) shower room. Liz Truss writing a book to “share the lessons” from her farcical premiership. Billionaires threatening to cage fight each other or biohacking themselves to eternal life when Earth might be incompatible with all human life pretty soon. Matt Hancock – OK, he doesn’t matter but I can’t stop myself whispering “why?” at each fresh full-body cringe that marks his post-politics “career” (couldn’t we put him on a hamster wheel in the Atlantic? I bet he’d agree if we tell him Channel 5 is filming it).
Increasingly, I think coping with life in 2023 is a matter of shedding the impulse to seek explanations. We’ve accepted (sort of) that we live in a post-truth age; it is probably time to accept we are post-meaning too. Let last week’s cautionary tale of Virgin Media reporting that a mysterious crater on a Dublin beach might be “the aftermath of a cosmic event” when it was dug by “some fellas … with a kid’s shovel” guide you.
What does it all mean? Nothing. Save your energy. You’ll need it to trap squirrels and fight the sewer people soon enough. Time to embrace the age of the inexplicable.
Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist