There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind.

There is a feeling which persists in England, that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that ony foreigners do.
'Make 'em dry', is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, 'make 'em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing 'em once a week.'
It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been.

He'd seen this process before: It didn't matter what happened in the world - genocidal wars, natural disasters, unspeakable crimes, mass disappearances, whatever - eventually people got tired of brooding about it. Time moved on, seasons changed, individuals withdrew into their private lives, turned their faces toward the sun. On balance, he thought, it was probably a good thing.

"It's kind of amazing", Christine remarked, as they stood with the other passengers on the concrete apron, waiting to retreive their luggage. "You converted him to a religion you don't even believe in yourself."
"I didn't convert him. He converted himself."

"I'm not greedy", Nora went on, picking up the thread of her speech, "I'm not asking for that perfect day at the beach. Just give me that horrible Saturday, all four of us sick and miserable, but alive, and together. Right now that sounds like heaven to me."

But Laurie knew. Deep in her heart, as soon as it happened, she knew. She'd been left behind. They all had. It didn't matter that God hadn't factored religion in His decision-making - if anything, that just made it worse, more of a personal rejection.

Il était une fois trois petits cochons qui s'ennuyaient à la ferme.
Ils voulaient avoir leur maison à eux. Mais chacun voulait la construire à son idée :
- Moi, je la voudrais comme ci.
- Moi, je la voudrais comme ça.
- Et moi, comme ci et comme ça.
Ils n'arrivaient pas à se mettre d'accord.
- Eh ! bien, dit le plus jeune, partons chacun de notre côté ; nous verrons qui de nous trois fera la plus jolie maison.
- C'est une bonne idée ! dirent les deux autres.
Et ils s'en allèrent chacun de leur côté.

"Je veux ma maman !" dit Lou

Now that her inital fear had diminished, something else had begun to emerge from her. Something more strange. And, he thought, deplorable. A coldness. Like, he thought, a breath from the vacuum between inhabited worlds, in fact from nowhere: it was not what she did or say but what she did not do and say.

You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it's changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople.

There was simply no preparation in life for the determined madness of others.

I am of the generation of arse, he mouthed and laughed silently. We couldn't find water in a reservoir. When we walk in a forest we all die. We are but baby birds fallen from nests to an unforgiving earth.

This was never a place for a man to be, ever. He felt that instinctively. You got mixed up with the kind of madness that nailed skulls to walls.