Sandwiches have a long and colourful tradition, said to have been invented by the Earl of Sandwich in the 18th century who apparently ordered his servant to bring him some meat tucked between two pieces of bread. So thus the delicacy was born. I can vouch for the town of Sandwich, in Kent, England, which is a beautiful place, full of old buildings and more importantly pubs selling good beer and guess what? Sandwiches. Pfizer had a facility there, but in their infinite wisdom they recently closed it. Just up the road was a fireworks factory, lots of little huts dispersed about a rather large field, presumable to avoid explosion of rotten sandwiches. Even further up the road there used to be a hovercraft terminal, which, for a  large fee would transport you and your car over the English Channel to France. That was in the days before the channel tunnel. To a chemist the word sandwich has another connotation, sandwich compounds in which a metal atom sits between two rings, usually cyclopentadienes. Recently a review appeared describing the discovery, structural elucidation and uses of these interesting compounds (1). I was amazed to read that R.B. Woodward also had his fingers in the pie, or rather sandwich, which I suppose is not too surprising. Some 60 years ago reports appeared, in Nature and the Journal of the Chemical Society (2,3), describing attempts to prepare fulvalene by oxidising cyclopentadienylmagnesium bromide with FeCl3. They obtained yellow crystals, always...