WHAT are you having for lunch? Probably a sandwich. As it’s National Sandwich Week, maybe you should go mad and have two.

Maybe not.

We buy an incredible 3.5billion ready-made sandwiches a year and spend £7.8billion doing so.

And most of them are rubbish.

A generation ago we would never have thought of buying a takeaway sandwich. We made our own at home and took them to work wrapped in greaseproof paper and a brown paper bag or an OXO tin.

But now lorry loads of sandwiches thunder through the night, from one end of the country to the other. Would you make a sandwich, put it in the fridge and then send it on a 200mile journey before eating it? Of course not No wonder many bought sandwiches, with their thin, damp bread, taste indistinguishable from their cardboard wrapping. Wraps could easily be soggy newspaper for all the taste they have. And that’s before you start on the all-purpose gloop which seems to feature in most.

The exception are mainly from delis and small shops where sandwiches are made to order with proper recognisable ingredients and actually taste of something nice.

Any sandwich counter now offers a dizzying array of fillings. This is because the bread or wrap or panini holding it all together tastes of nothing much at all.

A good sandwich needs good bread - proper bread, not a flabby imitation - and ideally proper butter. After that, any filling is a bonus. You don’t need gloop.

Making a sandwich isn’t rocket science. A child can do it. So why don’t we buy the ingredients and make more sandwiches at home? They’ll taste much nicer – and save that £7.8 billion too.

HAVE you seen where Pippa Middleton is having her wedding reception? It’s a 140 foot orangery, erected in a field at her parents’ home and it’s apparently cost £100,000.

All that money to get married in a posh greenhouse – and they won’t even have time to grow tomatoes in it.

MEANWHILE, Katie Price told Loose Women this week that her wedding to Peter Andre was a “ridiculous showcase” and even though it took place in the real Downton Abbey and cost £1million, she didn’t even enjoy it.

What’s more, the marriage lasted less than four years.

Our wedding cost around £50 and has lasted nearly 39 years – so far. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions.

SO if robots are going to be doing all our jobs, what are we going to do with ourselves?

Automation and technology are sweeping away thousands of jobs a year. Not always in obvious ways. Everyone from bank clerks, travel agents to translators and illustrators are missing out.

Nail technicians and chefs seem pretty safe at the moment. But it’s probably only a matter of time.

Meanwhile, schools still put the emphasis on training students for exams and jobs which aren’t going to exist any more. And the real irony is that all those activities which can enrich our lives and fill our spare time are the very subjects that are being pushed to the edge of a crowded exam-based curriculum.

Art, music, crafts, sport, are all vital to a rounded life – especially when people have lots of time available – yet less and less emphasis is paid to them. We need to be sparking children’s interests in a huge variety of subjects – enough interest to get them through another seventy years of perhaps not much else to do..

The chances are, of course, that they’ll dismiss them as bor-ING and got back to their phones. But you’ll have planted an idea and years later it might bear fruit. It’s why we take small children to museums and castles and libraries and let them fidget through pantos and plays. IT’s not just for now – it’s for the rest of their lives.

When footballers spend much of their spare time gambling – Wayne Rooney apparently lost £500,000 in two hours in a casino recently – then it’s a sign that not only have they got more money than sense, but that they can’t think of anything better to do.

Educating people for jobs isn’t getting us very far. It’s time we started educating them for leisure.

AFTER a row fuelled by drink and drugs, an Oxford University student punched her boyfriend, threw a laptop at him and then stabbed him with a bread knife.

Normally, she’d end up in prison but the judge has delayed sentencing as he said a custodial sentence would harm her career. She wants to be a heart surgeon.

If she’d been dim, she’d be in the slammer now, which seems grossly unfair. Are clever people above the law?

There’s no doubt that the student is very clever. But that apart, is a drug addict with a drink problem and an uncontrollable temper, really the best person to be cutting open people’s hearts?

THE Conservatives want to give workers up to a year’s unpaid leave to look after elderly or sick relatives.

Great idea. In the last 20 years, working life has improved for parents but caring for someone old and ill is much more complicated and a lot less fun. But when Grandad needs looking after or Granny’s had her hip done will it be their son or their daughter who takes time off to care for them?

You’re right. There are some devoted sons and husbands out there but in most case caring for the old will be yet another job for women.

THEY put a nice new sign up on the new road just south of Scotch Corner. Then because the road wasn’t open yet, they covered the nice new sign with paint. Wouldn’t it have been better just to wait to put the sign up until the road was ready? Or is that too simple?

And they wonder why the work is six months behind schedule… MATCHING earrings are uncool, says Kate Moss this week, following a trend set by Gwyneth Paltrow (of course) and Ivanka Trump. “Nobody wears pairs of earrings any more. It’s old fashioned.”

Our family has long believed that non-matchings socks and gloves keeps feet and hands just as warm as those that match. Husband memorably once went out in mis-matched shoes.

I always thought we were disorganised. But now I realise we were really trend-setters all along.