| There is a story about a wise old man who lived, many years ago, high in the Indian mountains. Every day the man ate the same food, not just the same breakfast or the same lunch but the exact same thing for every single meal, every single day, like Mariah Carey. He ate only this one thing, and though the precise details have been lost in the mists of time that thing was mainly rice so it was already quite boring – not just for him, but also for the person whose job it was to prepare his meals. Eventually the cook confronted him. “Why do you always eat the same thing?” the cook asked. “Are you not as bored of eating it as I am of cooking it?” The old man shook his head. “It is not the same food,” he said. “How can I eat exactly the same thing twice? Every day is different.” Four years ago this month the Guardian ran an article by the Welsh sheep farmer Wilf Davies about his life. “I have a routine, just like nature,” he wrote. “That extends to what I eat. I’ve had the same supper for 10 years, even on Christmas Day: two pieces of fish, one big onion, an egg, baked beans and a few biscuits at the end. For lunch I have a pear, an orange and four sandwiches with paste. When I go to the supermarket, I know exactly what I want. I’m not interested in other food. I’ve never had Chinese, Indian, French food. Why change? I’ve already found the food I love.” The film-maker Christian Cargill read this article and thought it was a tale the world needed to hear, making Davies the central character in his short film Heart Valley. “There was a story there that needed to be told,” Cargill said. “I think it’s a universal message. It’s a message of hope. It’s a message of appreciating our place and every day we have in the world. Some people may judge him and say he’s not experiencing new things. When we discussed that with him he said, ‘I get to have my favourite meal every single day. What could be better in life than that?’ I think that says it all.” Talking of consuming an infinitely repeating menu of basically identical stuff, the Premier League is back – and what, indeed, could be better in life than that? The recent international break forced an unwelcome pause in our Daviesian diet, leaving us all utterly desperate for action to restart. “I definitely am because it has been 15 or 16 days, or even longer, since I last managed a game,” said Liverpool-based tactician Arne Slot. For Slot this unhappy period followed another unhappy period in which his side lost successive games to be booted out of the Bigger Cup and flub the Milk Cup, but perhaps it has worked to his team’s advantage. Maybe sometimes, Slot mused, change is good. “It was maybe a good moment,” he said. “You go to your international team and things are new again. Maybe that helped as well. It is nice when players go to a different environment.” On Wednesday Slot’s champions-in-waiting host local rivals Everton, whose recent improvement has surely saved them from going to a different environment of their own, in the form of the Championship. The last Merseyside derby ended in February in a 2-2 draw and with Slot being sent off, an embarrassment the Dutchman is refusing to rule out repeating. “I am hoping I will act differently but I can’t promise,” he said. “What I am sure about is that I will be so, so, so surprised if I ever experience eight minutes of so many controversial decisions to our disadvantage again.” And surely he will not. After all, how can he have that experience again? Every day is different. Now it’s time for a sandwich with paste. | 