Sausage Quest

Pig Hands (No Body)

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 09:00:20 -0500

It has come to my attention - and to yours as well if you too have a controlling interest in a profitable calendar company as I do - that a new year has begun. A week ago, in fact, but then I didn’t attest to the quality of the calendars we sell. Instead of March they say Morch and August is just an ok photo of a parking space.

However a new year is indeed upon us, like a dog who will not be told not to jump up, despite us now being a bit scared of dogs after 2021 - also a dog - ate one or more of our sweet children and laughed at us when its owner wasn’t looking but we saw.

The end of each year gives us a break, a chance for growth and a sense of rebirth. The nights are becoming shorter, the days more full of light. There’s a crisp, new leaf of paper lying in front of us, waiting for us to write our stories.

I also froze a shitload of these:

To me, the pig in blanket - as well as being a bit of a mockery of pigs, since the sausage is in a blanket also made of pig meaning that even the slightest second of additional thought about the name paints a deeply grotesque picture - is the most delicious and exotic of the festive snacks. Therefore I refuse - REFUSE - to limit myself to just the month of December. I’m similar to one of those people who celebrates Christmas every day of the year with all the lights and fake snow and music but instead of that I eat sausages and my kids still speak to me.

Also the ones pictured above with my hand - more on that later - were bought in Morrisons on Holloway Road, north London. They say Market Street to make it sound more quaint but imagine that quaint Market Street with a fight at the tills and getting home and someone has ripped all the mailboxes off the wall of your building and you’ll have a closer idea of how much of a mockery Morrisons are making of your imagination.

Without further ado - there has been much ado I know but it is still Chraismas according to my calendar so please indulge me - here is the cooking process for the shrouded heartburn grenades I lovingly cooked - this is a very generous term - in my own oven that I rent.

The use of tinfoil makes this appear more like a fashion shoot, which is very appropriate given how fashion forward these sausages are (Jackets: Models’ Own). Here we are with stage one, a delicious catwalk.

Here is a closeup in case you want to see what sodium metabisulphite looks like up close and personal. Following this stage they all went into the oven and after an indeterminate amount of time because I forgot to check, this is what came out.

My my sausages what a transformation! From pink little adventurers all bundled up to face whatever mysteries lay ahead to slightly overcooked little adventurers who saw horrible things on your voyage about which you will never speak.

Now, normally there would be a series of jaunty photos here as I measure the sausages against various household objects, children, sunglasses, a postage stamp with a ski jumper on it (this is June in the calendars we have), but this time a troubling sequence began.

Here is the standard, the classic, the bread and butter, the cheese and ham:

It is my oddly-proportioned hand holding a pork product aloft, displaying it to the lesser pork products so that they know a new leader has been born to take them to greener pastures. This sausage leader has burst through their cape, such is the uncontainable volume of their wisdom.

Turning the pork prophet around for a better glimpse of the future of these proud people, however:

Whose hand is this? Why are there so many crevices? Has age caught up with me in the specific area of my palm? Why am I sticking a pinky out? Do I believe myself to be a sausage aristocrat? So devastated was I to discover that instead of a hand I know have a counterfeit leather handbag, I couldn’t find time to appraise the sausage, which was delicious! The hand, however. If that’s what lift buttons see when I press them I am surprised the other lift buttons don’t recoil into their little button slots in disgust, thus pressing the button for every floor and making me as unpopular a lift co-passenger as I would deserve to be for having the hands of a sad monster.

Leaving aside my hand - honestly it looks like a topographic map in a fantasy novel about monsters made of ham - these pigs in blankets were fine. They were cheap pigs in blankets held aloft by a man with apparent water retention issues. They were salty, fatty and a bit crispy, just the way they should be and for that I applaud them with whatever these things are on the end of my wrists.

As a final insult, I emailed these photos from my mobile phone - oh yes it is 2022 in this household yes sir - and this is how the email showed up in my inbox:

Wonderful.

CURRENT LENGTH - THESE ARE VERY SMALL BUT I ATE SIX AND I SUPPOSE THAT ANSWERS SOME HAND QUESTIONS I HAD SO 750CM

SAUSAGE RATING - 6/10 THEY WEREN’T REALLY VERY GOOD DESPITE COMING FROM THE BEAUTIFUL MARKET STREET

Sausage Etiquette

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 13:12:53 -0400

You may infer from that title that I am referring to the etiquette of eating and/or sharing a sausage. Correct napkin usage, condiment employment, eye contact time limits, whether to start at the top, the bottom or go into the middle of it like corn on the cob.

These things are important to me. I was, after all, named (this is not true) the head of the Lord Privy Council (total lie) of Nicepipes (doesn’t exist) and I indeed did write the charter that sausage butlers across the land follow to this day (that bit actually is true).

Alas no, dear friends, I have not gathered you in my office today to discuss the cultural sensitivities of certain kinds of mustard (never have whole grain near an Earl) or the correct order of cutlery with which to eat the dazzling array of chipolatae we have waiting for us after this session. Today I wish to address the etiquette of the sausages themselves, to whit:

Heck.

Heck is a word I employ at the start of hexagon because I cannot spell hexagon. For a brief period in Vienna I was under a sausage hex but I also cannot spell hex I think you can see the joke. These, however, are not a sausage hex - see I actually can - these are Heck Sausages.

Heck is a brand of which I have been aware for a while - you do not sneak sausages by me physically or figuratively - and have been meaning to try but have also been waiting for them to be reduced in price for the head of the Lord Privy Seal of Nicepipes is a purely voluntary position. In that it doesn’t exist. In any way.

Red sticker applied, I dashed to the tills, paid for these and asked the lady to mind them until I did the rest of my shop.

Getting them home, I observed that there is perhaps an over-reliance on the word Heck.

I count three Hecks here, which is half of a hexagon and three hexes. There may be more I simply cannot say.

I also enjoy the cooking instructions. If you want them good, do this. If you want them less good for whatever reason, do that.

Getting them out of the packaging they are certainly sausages, sausages indeed with a strange, stubby-fingered hand sneaking up on them. Look out sausages! Ha ha no, that is my wretched, misformed hand.

I often find when a sausage has too much meat content (in this case 97% as the sausage-eyed among you will have noted), it’s less fun than when there’s sawdust, torn up curriculum vitae, the gubbins from watches and such in them, it removes the mystery and thrill somewhat, but we forge ahead!

Here they are in the pan. I’m not sure entirely what happened on the way from packaging to pan, if I’m honest. Perhaps a far-too-vigorous farewell embrace from another sausage in the packaging? I shall have to ask Heck if the sausages they send out together are related, like a tube-shaped Pals’ Battalion leaving behind a devastated sausage community that oh-so-recently waved their boys off to Heck.

I pan fried because I wanted them to be good. You can grill them if you’d rather they weren’t.

Here is a sausage held by my tongs against the backdrop of a wall. The wall is sort of a nice, light green. The sausage isn’t but that is ok because it is nice for a sausage and a nice, light green sausage would spell certain death. These Heck sausages smelled very good while cooking, had a good fat content from what I could tell (it is rude to ask) and cooked very evenly because they’re not full of shopping trolleys and HDMI cables or whatever.

I didn’t have a tape measure handy but I can tell you this is roughly the same length as a 13g tube of Revell’s Contacta modelling cement. If you have one to hand, it’s the same length, this is basically now VR. We are pioneers, you and I.

My plan was to have these nicepipes (for I am the Viceroy or whatever I said earlier) with veg and HP nice brown sauce:

But the HP was shitfaced and saying very lewd things about my family, so:

I moved to this very classy brown nice sauce I got for Christmas because I am the kind of person who receives brown sauce in gifting contexts.

Look it is a nice green.

And here we have it, a strange dish of cutesily-branded sausages, mashed carrot and swede, and gift sauce. The sausages are good, they’re good quality and I’d recommend them. They have a smooth texture rather than the springiness I find with some the high % sausages I’ve had, they’re not greasy and they didn’t cause my arm to ache as I held them aloft several times, so take from THAT what you will.

As an aside, I think there’s a fine line with cute branding, I personally don’t care for it, but Heck walks it quite nicely, any more would be too much, and the quality of the products means it’s not just branding for the sake of it selling an inferior product based on grabbing the eye. And I would know, I’m the Generalissimo of Porkpoles.

CURRENT LENGTH - DIFFICULT TO SAY ISN’T IT BUT I’VE CONSULTED THE REVELL’S WEBSITE AND CAN CONFIRM WE’RE UP TO 732CM

SAUSAGE RATING - A SOLID 8/10, I WILL BUY THESE AGAIN AND THAT IS THE HIGHEST COMPLIMENT I CAN PAY OTHER THAN YOUR GREEN WALL IS NICE

Sausage Skinflint

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 08:26:24 -0400

Often in cinema - the artform not the local Vue though this has happened in my local Vue when I have espied a slowly rotating sausage behind a teenager in a baseball cap who for some reason has decided I owe the establishment money despite me being expressly here to espy a sausage - there is a moment where a character lays their eyes on something so unutterably beautiful that it overrides their senses and they can no longer hear their colleague who is repeating their name over and over again as if that’s how you get someone’s attention.

For me that unutterable beauty - though I’m about to utter it, watch, I’ll utter it - is an orange sticker.

And The Macho Man Randy Savage who watches over me during my working day RIP Macho Man you are with the angels now.x.

When I see an orange sticker - sometimes they are yellow but I do not see colour only bargains - the world falls away so that only the sticker and I remain. It could be anything: grapes, bread, salmon, Spain, two of the Baldwin brothers (depending on which two). If it has a reduced sticker on it, it’s going in my basket and then going in my freezer (again depending on which two). This has been reduced twice, which means a) you know it’s cheap and b) there’s a reason that no one bought it when it was reduced once and I can only imagine it’s because I was fated to buy these sausages,

So it is that I ended up with six sausages that I, in my unrivalled sausage genius, forgot to separate before freezing, so had to cook all at the same time because they’d stuck together in the freezer I imagine because they are friends from long ago and don’t wish to be separated, which I respect, it is nice to have friends.

Here they are at a reunion that unbeknownst to them is about to become quite unpleasant for them but a treat for me and those who know me because I’m often very generous, sausagely. Sausagely didn’t trigger my spellcheck. This is surprising.

The pan you see there is cast iron, which I enjoy using to cook sausages. It’s like a normal pan but you have to take better care of it than you do yourself and it does the same as most other pans but while causing enormous strain on your wrist when holding sausages like this:

So, devastating wrist injuries aside, here’s what my pan did to the sausages almost entirely without my involvement.

Why yes, the teatowel is from Harrod’s! I hope you extrapolate from this that I am indeed living high on the hog and am not a man in his mid-30s who’s been locked in a small flat for months and whose tendency towards being trousered all day has suffered some quite devastating setbacks in that time.

What I hadn’t considered, of course, is that I’d have to eat all of these, and I can’t just sit there and eat six sausages as if that’s even a legal thing you can do outside of a competition setting. With my loose understanding of sell-by dates I had some sort of inkling that time was not on my side and so over the subsequent 24 hours my world became even more sausage-centric than is the norm. I was having sandwiches, chopping sausages into pasta, feeding a lesser Baldwin (again, depends which two I get) and just eating sausages as if they were a tantalising chocolate bar which is actually quite a nauseating concept.

I even gained an audience.

While Kelis’s milkshake was famously practically irresistible to men, locally, thus apparently is my house to this type of rabble. I have always been a draw for pigeons - one once tried to nest in my hair and that technically is not a joke - and now that there was this festival of sausage taking place I think they got the sense that there was food waste to be had BUT THERE WAS NOT for I ate the sausages and wrote a stern letter to the pigeon’s mum about personal space about which she was actually very understanding.

Yes my window is held open by peas.

The sausages themselves were fine, I note that the packaging claims that they are irresistible and I did not find this to be the case I found the entire scenario to actually be quite arduous, sausagely, and it is not one I’d care to repeat or will care to repeat when I repeat it. I would recommend these sausages but more to the point I would recommend bargains (again, depending which two you get).

CURRENT LENGTH - THIS WAS A BIT OF A BONANZA I AM NOT GOING TO LIE AND AS IT WAS SIX (THE MINIMUM REQUIRED OF A BONANZA) IT’S UP TO 698CM

SAUSAGE RATING - A SOLID 7/10, WOULD BE A 6 BUT THE BARGAIN IS IRRESISTIBLE (DEPENDING ON WHICH TWO YOU GET)

Sausage Money

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 10:20:35 -0400

Like many other people on this globe filled with waffles and ants and slippers, my free time has to be monetised so that I can continue to live near a small Tesco and a larger Waitrose. On Instagram, this bleak reality is known as a side hustle. It has a hashtag, which is #capitalismisabrokensystemandisonlymaintainedtoservetherich. I don’t know why they settled on that. Usually brevity is key. (I say this conscious of how lucky I am to have a main hustle, which is what jobs are called now).

In addition to being a sausageman in my downtime, I am a writeman in my uptime. I assemble words into an order that people enjoy enough to cross my palms with silver and paper and electronic bank transfers, and on many, many occasions, meat and fish.

To this end, I receive emails - I am special in this none of you receive emails - with listings of freelance writing jobs. Freelance is a word that means ‘job with no security but maybe there’ll be a desk? Can you sit cross-legged on the ground? Outside? Do you mind getting whooping cough for this listicle about shards of pottery?’ In one such recent email, a listing was for an article request by a magazine looking for people to write about sausages.

Now, I don’t know if you’re aware of this. I am aware but I have a little bit of inside info. I have written about sausages. So with all the glee of a schoolboy who has written about sausages for many years - don’t think about it, it doesn’t make sense - I contacted these magical purveyors of opportunity to write about sausages with my storied sausage history and the length of sausages I have eaten, cumulatively - this is not a joke this is truly what I did - and received this response.

Now, I’m not a clever man. I’m not a clever. I am a sausage. But I have gone to sausage university and I have the atrophied ventricles to prove it. This ranks as the biggest professional disappointment I’ve had since I discovered I couldn’t be paid for being ginger despite all of the many downsides. The person who got this gig has to have literally been a sausage masquerading as a person for decades who is finally ready to do a tell-all on how hard life has been when you’re literally a cumberland sausage in a wig and with one shoe on who somehow got a job as the artistic director of the Hayward Gallery. A cabal of sausages, perhaps, taking a break from being delicious - I am not upset at the sausages no sir - and suitable for any occasion to write down the memories of their aunt sausage and her life as a coastal smuggler.

And yes I was in the nude for my graduation photo

Anyway, back to business which isn’t really business because I’m not being paid but that is life. Here are some delicious sausages.

And they are going to provide a lot of joy and also, if you added a comma after ‘easy’ it would appear as if this person is soothing the sausages as if they are a skittish sausage horse and honestly that is a nice thought. Easy, homemade sausage. Good boy.

No

Thu, 14 May 2020 13:36:39 -0400

I am a sausageman of some renown as you probably already know if you…nown me? I have sausaged on many (two is many) continents, I’ve had good sausages, bad sausages, sausages I’ve measured against a baby, sausages I’ve accidentally put down on a seat at a cinema, sausages in pubs, bars, food markets, hockey games, on a boat one time and in a made-up place called ‘Prague’ that has a big clock that everyone pretends is real ok everyone it’s real. I once had a sausage from a place that suggested I lick my fingers instead of using a napkin. This is all documented in my previous work I would cite my sources but I literally am my source.

But I have never. Ever. Ever. Probably. Ever. Come across something as vile. As disgusting. As….vile. As this monstrosity.

When I emailed myself the photographs that I took of this sausage abomination, I gave the email the subject line ‘Bad Sausage’. That is true, and hopefully it a) gives you an idea of my feelings for this badpipe (not bagpipe that is a side project) and b) gives a thrilling - but safe - insight into how many photographs of sausages I send myself and also c) how proud my parents are.

These wretched, cylindrical, sweating foultubes were a lockdown emergency sausage situation - we have all had them I have asked everyone - and were very much a case of ‘I’d like these sausages please, John Tesco’, I call him John. At the outset, the auspices were good. There were sausages. That’s the extent of the auspices.

I got them in the pan - that makes it sound like I had to wrestle them which I did not but I think I did wrestle with my subconscious and sausage-sense which clearly knew trouble lay ahead - and cooked them. That’s the bare minimum, just in case you’re not as experienced as I am. Cook them prior to eating. Although it did not help in this scenario, it may have made them worse, we will surely never know.

The plan - which turned out to be folly, it was like a sausage Operation Market Garden but it is doubtful the movie about this sausage disaster will have as good a cast as A Bridge Too Far - was to cook - see above - two of these SUPPOSED nicepipes and then have them in a sandwich with a fried egg and some brown sauce, which is uniquely British in that we took the most disgusting colour, made a sauce that colour, then instead of calling it ‘lovely sauce’ or whatever we just stuck with brown sauce.

Look here is the lovely sauce.

I won’t show the cooking process, you’ll have to subscribe to my YouTube channel for that except it keeps getting taken down because they think Sausage Man 2000 is some sort of smut and not just a man enjoying meatpipes.

Here is the finished article, the Hindenburg of sandwiches. The bread and egg are fine and were of lower stakes to begin with, the lovely sauce is wonderful and brown. But the sausages my god. If there is a god. I can’t believe there would be one that would allow these to exist. They were simultaneously horrifically smooth in texture, but also contained what I can only describe as ‘grit’, but it’s unlikely to be grit isn’t it. It’s a bit of animal and I don’t know what bit but if I were to guess I’d say that if animals wore trousers it would be covered most of the time.

This is to sausages what a terrible sausage is to sausages. Greasy, textureless other than the trouser grit we discussed earlier [SausageQuest, 2020] and an all-round sandwich ruiner. Look at them again.

What’s the green bit? It’s not herbs! Is it a heretofore unknown part of animal genitalia discovered by John Tesco to befoul this even further? Don’t answer that as this food is now a part of me and I just can’t think about it. If I were to see, say, an elderly person putting these in their trolley I would dive on them like a grenade - the person, not the sausages - and say NO, YOU FOUGHT IN THE ‘PRAGUE’ THING, possibly breaking their hip and my own.

CURRENT LENGTH - I DON’T COUNT THESE AS SAUSAGES MORE AS SEMI-MYTHICAL TRIALS SENT TO TEST ME SO STILL 638CM

SAUSAGE RATING - 10/10 NO I AM JOKING I AM SUCH A JAPESTER IT’S 0/10

Sausage Distancing

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 10:49:38 -0400

If we say that the average sausage - there is no such thing, they are all beautiful in their own way but please bear with me - is 10-15cm, then during this period of social distancing, we should be standing at least 13.3 recurring sausages away from each other. I can’t bear to see a recurring sausage so let’s say that’s at least 14 sausages, possibly 20. I hope I have helped you to understand sausage distancing.

For other things that can be helpful during this time and that solely pertain to the increased usage of sausages in our daily lives, why not try using a frozen sausage to press a lift button safely, or to point at distant ships on the horizon? Sausage meat itself can be an excellent ersatz currency when the financial markets crash. A sausage, aimed correctly, can be used to deter thieves who have taken advantage of this pandemic situation to come to your house and steal all of your paintings of other, older sausages.

They also smell nice, so be careful with that because you don’t want people smelling sausages and then leaving their isolation to come and eat the sausages. You have to know what you’re dealing with otherwise you’re going to bring us all down because you wanted sausages and I would not be able to find it in myself to blame you.

Anyway, sausages. We were talking about sausages. I haven’t really been able to get ahold of any sausages, the people in my local supermarket seemed to go for those first because I live around completely rational geniuses who bought only what they needed for their next manned mission to the moons of Jupiter.

So what does a nicepipeman do when there’s no pipes to nice? I have absolutely no idea what that means. I was trying to say what does a sausageman do when there’s no man to…sausage. Look, I don’t have any sausages and I’m stuck in my house looking at a wall (not a Wall’s for they are sausages and as discussed I am sausageless). What I’ve done to dampen the tubemeat cravings is what everyone does when they can’t have something for tragic or inexplicable reasons; I’ve been looking at pictures of sausages. I would like to share a few favourites with you.

Firstly, to show my working and my research methodology, here’s what I did:

I typed ‘photo of a sausage’ into Google. It’s that simple ladies and gentlemen oh yes indeed all the tricks of the trade being laid bare in front of your very eyes. Now, the sausages.

These sausages are made of Quorn, and yet, curiously - or Quoriously - someone has stabbed them anyway. Was it to make sure they were not, in fact, alivemeat? Or did they harbour some sort of vendetta against the ruse? Perhaps these sausages were snitches who got what was coming to them? We’ll certainly never know but it is a mystery most intriguing.

These sausages have arranged themselves into the sausage-language written version of ‘best seller’, which a helpful butcher or scholar has then translated into ‘best seller’ and applied it to the image for those of us who do not have sausagetongue.

This is sealant but came up in my search anyway and really doesn’t everyone deserve to be told they’re a beautiful sausage.

Look at these playful pipes! My word if there’s an unsung hero in lifting our spirits during this trying time, it’s these sausages that have been arranged (probably with a little help from someone with hands!) into a lovely happy face. Thank you, sausage-face, which was literally already the name of this image file.

Look at this battle sausage, giving one last thumbs up before going on to assail a no doubt very well-fortified knife and fork. Godspeed, General.

This fellow tried to make good his escape but was captured in the nick of time by someone who looks very troubled for someone holding a delicious-looking sausage fugitive. She is not only angry at the sausage, but her own lackadaisical approach to correct sausage discipline while in custody. As she should be.

Ok one last one since I know we are all very busy looking at walls (not Wall’s because they are, as I believe was mentioned earlier, sausages). People often ask me - I have literally never been asked this question - what constitutes a perfect sausage, in my eyes. And I say - I have never said this - that I prefer a sausage in my hand and mouth, not my eyes! Then I get arrested. Anyway if I were to be asked that question and didn’t have that joke locked and loaded, I’d say this looks like it. A grilled sausage, slightly charred, looking coquettishly into the middle-distance as if it doesn’t know the photo is even being taken. This is a sausage that, if it lived in a house that had a toilet with the two flush buttons, would push the correct flush button every time. It would help flood relief efforts and never tell anyone, people would only find out when they saw it in its little waders in the back of shot on the news. It sponsors so many animals there is a wing of the zoo named Sausage Wing and sausages don’t even have wings but this one should because it is an angel.x

So there we have April’s roundup of sausages I’ve seen pictures of. Thank you for joining me, I hope you are all coping during this difficult period and are well-stocked with sausages with which you plan on being careful. Stay well, stay safe, stay sausages.

CURRENT LENGTH - STILL 638CM, BE CURIOUS TO KNOW HOW YOU’D THINK THIS WOULD HAVE CHANGED ANYTHING

SAUSAGE RATING - NOT REALLY THE POINT WAS IT

Hockey Sausages

Fri, 31 Jan 2020 11:16:03 -0500

That headline isn’t intended to imply that I consumed a sausage made of hockey. You can’t make sausages from hockey. Hockey is a game, and you can’t have game sausages. Except for literal game sausages which absolutely exist. Why are you in my house?

Your interloping aside - honestly do make yourself at home there are some Space Raiders in that cupboard - the heading of this essay is in relation to a sausage I ate whilst in attendance of a game of ice hockey, between my beloved Haringey Huskies - of whom I have always been a lifelong fan since four weeks ago - and the Peterborough somethings. Plumbers or whatever. They wore orange.

Look, there they are. In orange. My beloved Huskies are the ones in white, losing to the ones in orange so as not to upset them, because my beloved Huskies are nice like that. And also not as good as the orange ones. Can’t believe that I forgot that game sausages exist. Bush league.

And now we come to the sausage, which is what doctors say when they caution me about my blood pressure. I am joking, they do not say that. They say ‘this is abnormally high blood pressure’, it’s a little dance we do. I attended this game - the word is just haunting me now, there are so many game meats - with two of my friends, one of whom has appeared on this blog before because he is my sausage friend and one who hasn’t because prior to this occasion she was more of a sausage acquaintance but it is nice how these things evolve. They are a couple, I am not. They have the same shoe size I think.

If you are in London and are looking for a fun event, or are not in London but wish to make an incredibly expensive journey to something that will broadly present a lot of inconvenience, I recommend visiting Alexandra Palace (known to locals as Alexandra Palace) to spectate on a game of ice hockey. Unlike at professional sporting events, the prices are reasonable (tickets are around £7.50), the delicious pints of beer are good value (around £4.90) and there is food. I don’t know the price of this because, while two of us queued for beer, sausage friend 1 went for food.

There are views from Alexandra Palace - which the locals call Alexandra Palace - but I am not talented enough to make them look in any way appealing that is my curse.

Our queue was so long that, while we waited, he bought three of the food, ate his, and then stood alone, looking like the saddest man to ever wear a hat. Gaze upon him, beerless and alone, watching strangers play together with the implicit understanding that he cannot join them. If this sounds like your childhood, perhaps we can form some sort of club.

When will Papa return from the war?

Once we finally acquired our delicious pints of beer - I opted for Heineken because James Bond drinks it and I am James Bond and I drink it - we descended the stairs to save the littlest orphan from his lifetime of loneliness and indulge in our sausages, while he watched us doing that like the saddest man to ever watch a sausage.

Mine’s the one with just mustard because I’m no deviant.

This is 100% of what he purchased. By the time we descended the wooden hill, only 66% remained. The other 33% is inside him when this picture was taken, and whatever your mind just did is 100% your own fault. Shame on you.

Now, I wish to discuss an issue that has reared its thorny head on this here website in the past. Bread. And our lord and saviour Jesus Christ, please take a seat. When serving a sausage - or a man-deity - I understand that a food delivery system is needed. In the case of the humble sausage, that tends to be bread. Fine. But the bread doesn’t need to be asserting its dominance over the sausage at any stage. I did not come to this sausage situation with the hope of eating lots of bread. I did not wait in line - I didn’t wait in line for this regardless but bear with me - in order to buy a sausage-flavoured baguette. If I had done that, I would rightly expect that the police be called, because that is disgusting.

I queued - I didn’t queue - for the sausage. So why - why - am I then forced to peel the sausage like it’s a confused banana? What is in that photograph that I so lovingly took, is an entire baguette that is assaulting my delicious sausage - and it actually was a delicious sausage, which makes this even more heinous.

Look they played hockey.

By the time I’d finished ‘eating’ this ‘sausage’ in ‘bread’, this was what was left.

I could sincerely poison eight weak ducks with this. You’re not meant to give them bread. If I could be poisoned by bread I’d be writing this lecture from the grave, because this was so much bread. Cut the baguette in half, have sausage overhang, let the nicepipe breathe, because what you have done is made me eat an entire duvet cover just to get to the delicious person sleeping in it. I have genuinely no idea what that means.

I also got a hat but this isn’t a millinery issue.

My gripes about the bread and the son of God aside, this was an above-average sausage. It’s not artisan, it hasn’t been shown a photograph of Judy Garland that was held by a community leader, no one has attempted to attach the prefix ‘craft’ at any stage of its production, but it’s a hard-working tube that knows what it’s about and enjoys square dancing. If it wasn’t for all of that bread, I maybe would have been able to enjoy it a bit more.

Also really do see the Huskies, or the Lee Valley Lions, or whatever your local NIHL team is because it is fun and they need your support and you might be able to buy a hat and also if you like bread they have bread.

CURRENT LENGTH - DIDN’T MEASURE THIS ONE I KEEP FORGETTING TO BRING IMPLEMENTS BUT JUDGING BY THE STANDARD SIZE OF AN ENTIRE LOAF OF BREAD I’M GIVING IT 17CM WHICH PUTS US ON 638CM

SAUSAGE RATING - YOU TELL ME. 7/10. PROBABLY. BREAD. BREAD/10.

Everything’s Just Sausages Now, Anyway

Sun, 15 Dec 2019 11:22:51 -0500

When things aren’t going so well on a personal or national scale - say, when Brian Harvey ran over his own head in a car he himself was driving after eating several baked potatoes, or whenever anyone failed to successfully complete the challenges they set themselves on You Bet (honestly you didn’t have to bet, it’s truly fine if you can’t beat a lift to the top of Blackpool Tower and really you should have known that would be the outcome, and this is a real thing that happened and I’m still annoyed about it 22 years later) - there are two places into which I retreat.

One of them is the 1983 smash hit Holiday Road, by Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham, which was written for the National Lampoon Vacation series of films charting the ill-fated and often comedic attempts at holidays made by the Griswold family.

And the other is sausages. Buckingham actually played guitar, bass guitar, keyboards, percussion drum programming and sang the vocals for Holiday Road so, you know. I hope that makes you appreciate it more.

Look, here’s loosely-termed ska band Limp covering it in 1997, I think you’ll agree that nothing is added to the original, such is Buckingham’s talent.

Now, to sausages. I have not sausaged as frequently as I would have liked of late, and so required a return to form akin to that of Lindsey Buckingham recording Holiday Road after leaving Fleetwood Mac. So that is what I did. I Holiday Roaded. For those unfamiliar with London, there is a very, very good daily food market on a street called Leather Lane. So I sausaged on Leather Lane, and there is nothing I can do about that sentence or the images currently befouling your imagination.

The Leather Lane sausage slinger - nope, I don’t like it either - I chose for my return to tubes was Highlander Games, a pipe-pusher - I know, I know I keep doing it - of some renown, mainly for selling a sausage that’s a metre long.

Stop it. I shouldn’t be able to hold an entire buffet in my hands. I don’t even…am I meant to tackle that alone or with a friend, and if with a friend, do we like…Lady and The Tramp it and meet in the middle? I don’t like that at all, I wouldn’t know where to…would the middle not just get all soggy and then what does that do to the structural integrity of the thing? Do I get scaffolding? I’m not qualified to build scaffolding.

Anyway, sausage-construction aside, this is the menu.

And these are the sausages.

And this is Lindsey Buckingham’s 1983 smash hit, Holiday Road.

I opted for the hot dog. This is a kielbasa type affair, something to which I’m relatively unaccustomed. Normally I’m a bratwurst or Lindsey Buckingham’s 1983 smash hit Holiday Road kind of person, so I had high hopes for this one.

Firstly, the gentleman serving the sausages was a genuinely pleasant, engaging person who brightened the gloomy day as he prepared my hot dog. Normally, I’m used to toppings going…on top…I thought that was why they…anyway but this time he put them underneath the sausage. So I got red cabbage, sauerkraut, pickles and onions underneath the sausage, and mustard and sriracha on top, resulting in this delicious culinary maelstrom.

Things went disastrously wrong immediately after this. Since it was raining, this was eaten huddled in an archway. The under…ings immediately leached all of their fluid into the bread, so that just fell apart like…wet bread - I am a copywriter available for freelance work - and so that meant I had to employ the fork, then the fork snapped, then I only had one napkin so my face was covered in wet cabbage and rain and bits of torn napkin and a LEGO and puzzlement, it was not very Holiday Road at all. Individually, each component was fantastic. The bread was very good, the sausage had a perfect snap and was probably one of the best sausages I’ve had since I started this vital research project, the cabbage, kraut etc. all came together to create a genuinely excellent sausage experience.

Avenge me.

If I were to go again, which I will, so I don’t know why I’m being so vague, but if I were to go again I’d get the sausage box with bread, which is my affectionate nickname for my local baker but he doesn’t know it. Or me. He doesn’t know I exist, no matter how many nicknames I give him. I’d heartily recommend visiting Highlander Game, and I recommend also that you Google that, because I didn’t know they almost made a Highlander video game, and now I do, because I needed that photo of the metre-long sausage from above and had to find it somewhere, so Googled it and delved into all the super-relevant information I needed about a cancelled computer game from 2011 that I probably would have played if it existed, which it doesn’t, and it should, but it doesn’t.

Anyway, go to Highlander Game for sausages and tell them I sent you, because they don’t know who I am and that would make me and everyone else laugh.

CURRENT LENGTH - PRIOR TO THIS WET SAUSAGE CAPER WE WERE ON 606CM AND I DIDN’T MEASURE THIS BECAUSE IT WAS RAINING AND THAT MADE MORE SENSE BEFORE I TYPED IT. I’M GOING TO PUT IT AT A COMFORTABLE 15CM AND AN UNCOMFORTABLE SILENCE SO 621CM WHICH IS THE LENGTH OF THREE RONALD REAGANS AND A BIT.

SAUSAGE RATING - SAUSAGE ITSELF 9/10 ABILITY TO EAT 3/10 BUT THAT MIGHT BE USER ERROR

HOLIDAY - ROOOAAAAOOOOOAAAAAOOOOAAAOOOOAD

Tonight, we dine in Hell

Sun, 11 Aug 2019 12:29:47 -0400

It has been a while since I sausaged. This isn’t the fault of anyone reading, I have merely taken a sausage sabbatical. It’s maybe your fault, I don’t know you. Is it? That’s disappointing, I have done nothing to you sausagely, as far as I know.

Regardless of whose fault this is and isn’t, I recently joined a surprisingly fragrant friend of mine, let’s call him James, because everyone else seems to, and journeyed to Camden Market in search of nicepipes. Now, for those of you who are unfamiliar with Camden Market, going there at 2pm on a Saturday is as good an idea as saying huh, what’s Pearl Harbour up to, should we just really fuck it up for a bit?

These are the crowds.

An intractable morass of people who can’t walk in straight lines, and whose spatial-awareness is roughly equivalent to that of the Hindenburg. I am hitting the disasters hard today and I don’t know why but stay with me and we’ll see what happens.

Our target was a sausagery of some acclaim that has a stall in the market. I’m not sure if that was already apparent, I am not your sense of perception. Unless I am. In which case, yikes for you.

Having shoulder, elbow and, in James’ case buttock-barged our way through the throng of ‘London is basically a theme park so no laws of etiquette ever could possibly apply’ tourists, and being told by a sign to ‘eat the beat’, which, honestly, isn’t a message I want in a food market. I want to be told ‘our pies are nice’, not to eat sound, which famously isn’t food, this sight hove into view.

Now, I know and you know that the hotdog sign is what I’m referencing, but as an aside, if you’re buying calamari from a place next to the Regents Canal, as hand food, RIP whatever insides you have left because culinary decision-making isn’t your forte. I speak as a man who measures sausages that he eats and who is somehow still walking around looking at things.

We groin-checked our way through the crowd - honestly he’s like a game of Buckaroo I’ve never seen power like it - and joined the line for these supposed hotdogs. The place is called Oh My Dog! so I was already consumed by hatred for the awful pun. They also weren’t cheap.

Listen. If you are charging me £8.50 for a meatpipe and bread, I’d better be able to call it in March so it’ll do my taxes. It had better be capable of establishing complex trade agreements. In the end, James paid and I haven’t paid him back, but he’s a rich number wizard so this is the correct order of things. James. What a silly name.

They also had little plastic replicas of the sausages as if I didn’t know what sausages looked like.

Oh they don’t have feet and a bow tie? No shit, I’ve been eating orphans this entire time for no reason.

Anyway we (James) paid and this was the result of our (his) financial transaction.

A watch strap and a bad, old tattoo. I jest, the sausage was what we bought, I had you fooled because I am a master of illusion and hiding male pattern baldness. This hot dog, the one in the photograph posted mere centimetres above, was…fine. The sausage had barely any flavour, the bread was too doughy, the onions weren’t that crispy and its views on the life and work of Jeanette Winterson were honestly disappointing. She’s a treasure and we must preserve her.

Then it pissed down.

What you see here, is a wet sausage. A damp pipe. A rain rod. Wow that last one needs some workshopping. It rained so much you could smell Camden, and honestly, and I know I’m saying’ honestly’ a lot but it means you have to believe me no backsies, Camden fucking stinks.

And also don’t you DREAM about recycling here on our turf. This is a PRIVATE BIN! NO!

We cowered under a balcony for 20 minutes, eating our depressing dough-lengths - christ, that one as well - and then made a run for it to a pub. I’m not telling you which pub it is my (our) business.

I can tell you that the sausage was longer than the distance between James’ nipples and here is proof since that’s so important to you when you’re here in my house.

He got ketchup on his because he does not sausage correctly but forgive him for that as I did, not everyone sausages terrifically and I spilled mustard on myself in the rain and he didn’t so he has the dexterity required for a true sausage wrangler. I didn’t make that dirty, you did.

All in all, this was fine. It was probably priced correctly given the size, and the man behind the counter was very nice to us. Would I go back? No, I will literally never go back, this was a Great Chicago Fire of an experience, but if they came to my house and said would you like a sausage, I would investigate their intent and then say yes, depending on the outcome of my investigation.

CURRENT LENGTH - WE WERE ON 591CM AND THIS WAS WIDER THAN JAMES’ SAUCER-LIKE NIPPLES WHICH IS WHAT I GUESS THEY LOOK LIKE I HAVE NEVER SEEN THEM SO LET’S CALL THIS 606CM WHICH IS ENOUGH TO FELL A LARGE RAM

SAUSAGE RATING - IT WAS EXPENSIVE AND NOT AMAZING BUT I’M GOING TO GIVE IT A 7/10 FOR EFFORT SINCE THEY EFFORTED

Horror Sausages

Sat, 06 Apr 2019 09:30:28 -0400

There are few things more expensive as an individual human being - which I am I have all my papers that prove it - than living in London, England. Possibly if you were to, say, buy every egg produced by every chicken on earth for the next four years you’d be coming roughly up to the same price as a coffee and small pastry at many of the city’s establishments.

It is for this reason that I am thankful to the kind people at Vue Cinemas - I don’t know if they’re kind but I’m almost positive they’re people and just over 50% of something appears to be enough here these days - for their decision to allow children, the elderly and myself to enjoy cinematography for just £5 each Monday. In my last experience, I saw the second Lego movie for just £5 and had the entire theatre to myself as if I was some sort of king and not just a man seeing children’s movies during school hours which is technically actually less creepy than seeing them around 4pm I think but I’m not the police.

The Monday that just passed us, not the upcoming Monday I don’t have those kinds of powers yet, my £5 bought me access to a screening of Jordan Peele’s new movie Us, an impossible and terrifying film about a young couple with children that can somehow afford a house. I think that was the gist, there was a lot going on. It was good, there were many nice properties in the film.

Anyway, since my ticket was £5, I thought I’d treat myself to a soft drink - I know I am like Jim Morrison whoa slow down - and as I walked into the lobby, this beautiful site confronted me.

How did you know, Vue, that one of the most prolific sausage-measurers currently working would walk in at that moment, you marvellous bastards.

Then this progression happened:

Juicy, yes, very good within certain boundaries, no one wants a sausage that is too juicy because that’s a raw sausage, normally.

Delicious, yes, that’s certainly an added bonus that you can’t always count on when dealing with meatpipes, I’m listening.

Ok you’re possibly overdoing this now you have already sold me the sausage but I suppose I will wait to see what the next adjective you’re going to use is.

I don’t have time to get into why this is disgusting, but an image of a sausage that has mouth-watering overlaid on it followed by thirst-quenching is just a real bag of can we not please. I almost was put off my sausage and that is something that only very tragic things can achieve, like perhaps a news story about poisoned sausages being used to thin the population, a kind of sausage eugenics. I probably would cut down my intake in that situation but these are directly comparable so don’t do it again.

I ordered the large because I didn’t come to mess around I came to watch a movie about nice houses and eat sausages.

When there are only two left they either sell a lot or don’t sell any. This was 2pm on a Monday so a small leap of faith was required though in our heart of hearts we all know that sausage spent a long weekend relaxing on that heater.

I measured it using my cup but didn’t measure the cup so chaos is currently in charge.

It got its own seat and now I look back at this image I realised I put virtually exposed food on the same platform as 100,000 barely concealed buttocks and other bits. I was really running the gauntlet here I am basically Mad Max but for sausage hygiene which again, who knows.

Someone walked in as I took this photo so I started eating immediately and didn’t break eye contact. The cinema is like prison, you can’t show weakness or people will sit directly in front of you and slightly spoil your viewing experience. Exactly like prison.

This, for a cinema hot dog, was really, really good. The bread was a little plain and flaky but as a vessel for the bulk-ordered holiday sausage it conveyed it was sufficient. Imagine the taste of a hot dog right now. That’s how this tasted. Like if you made bacon from a cow then dropped it in some dust but it’s good somehow.

As I am not a movie reviewer I will leave that to the professionals but sausage-wise, Us is very good. Not too long, full of character and - and sorry for the spoiler here - the mustard holds the crispy onions on very well.

CURRENT LENGTH - I DIDN’T MEASURE IT AS MENTIONED BUT LET’S ALL AGREE THAT I’M NOW ON 591CM WHICH WOULD BE ENOUGH ROPE TO LASSO THE SURVIVING CHUCKLE BROTHER FROM A SAFE DISTANCE

SAUSAGE RATING - IT DIDN’T QUENCH MY THIRST FOR WHICH I AM GRATEFUL BUT IT DID PROMISE THAT IT WOULD SO 7/10

Swiss Sausage

Mon, 18 Mar 2019 15:24:29 -0400

I have recently returned to the city of London for a spell where, as I’m currently enjoying a period of unemployment on a freelance basis, I have weighed up my options and moved into a fictional neighbourhood of which no one has ever heard and though even I am no longer sure it’s my hand in front of my face as I sit here or some bus conductor from Narnia, I have indeed very cleverly used wordplay to tie the name of the area into the title of this white paper.

That is correct, I have moved to Combledon.

That was a lie I duped you, Combledon really doesn’t exist, I have moved to Swiss Cottage, but you believed me for a second and questioned your knowledge I am like the Riddler but wearing more garments.

Swiss Cottage is a part of London that compels residents to defend it by mentioning the zone it’s in (2), the borough it’s in (Camden) and the state it’s in (not…terrific). If you haven’t travelled through Swiss Cottage and are wondering how it got its name, pop on down from Combledon and feast thine eyes on the actual, genuine reason this area is so called.

There. Is. A. Swiss. Cottage. And. They. Named. An. Area. After. It.

That’s real, that’s not a movie set, though it does look like Odeon is about to beat it up. As it’s been a while since I’ve cruised through the world of meatpipes - ignore that wording - I felt that I’d use some time to visit this biscuit tin to see what sausages they’re slinging - again, move past it as we have done so deftly for so many years.

Ye Olde Swiss Cottage - I’m not fucking making this up - sits between eight actual lanes of traffic, the constant hum of which I’m 90% sure has stunted my reading age, possibly even reducing it. The website promised me a Jumbo Butcher’s Hot Dog, and though I think fat-shaming a butcher is unkind, this was what I settled on on my walk down.

Except they don’t do that any more so I had this.

And somehow sat at a table that was so small my knees were higher than my food.

When Wilfred Owen wrote in Dulce et Decorum Est:

Bent double, like beggars under old sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

I couldn’t really picture the image. Now, however, having eaten with my body bent at the waist into an acute angle, I really think I appreciate the experience he’s describing. It’s possible he doesn’t understand my plight, quite honestly.

Anyway, that’s not the fantastical chalet’s fault. I have eyes, I’ve seen them, I chose the wrong table and just stuck to my guns. The meal.

The sausages were dense and a little bland, like myself, so I appreciated that. The mashed potato was very, very bad but you’ll have to refer to my other blog for that review. The conflict here came from the fact that, while I wish to add length to my increasingly-dismal total, I actually don’t necessarily want to eat three piping hot, massive porkpoles to myself all at once in the afternoon. They were so hot I almost wept, which was apt because once I’d finished eating, so did my food:

What bleakness is happening in that kitchen that it makes the food cry? What horrors have you seen, my little orange companion? Is there someone I can call?

The rest of the meal went off without a Hitch, because I don’t like that film and besides, there are no TVs in the doily shack. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that specific dish to anyone except a man with a vendetta who wishes to rid the earth of cylindrical food as soon as possible, the ski hole isn’t a bad local pub, the staff are nice, and I’ve heard that the cool kids get tinnitus now anyway.

Lol jk I can’t hear anything any more.

If you’re ever in the area - stop laughing, that is unkind - be sure to shine a sausage in the sky and I will adjoin you and step through the mist - it’s car exhaust - into the mythical treehouse that sits amid the junction of two of the main arterial roads in and out of London. We will laugh up until the black lung takes us.

CURRENT LENGTH - THIS WAS A BIG STEP UP AND THE YOUNGISH CONTENDER DEALT WITH IT BY GETTING A RUNNY NOSE BECAUSE THEY KEPT THEIR HEAT SO BADLY SO LET’S SAY 576CM

SAUSAGE RATING - THEY WERE INCREDIBLY GOOD VALUE AT £7.95 JUST A LITTLE TOO MUCH FOOD SO I’LL SAY 6/10 BUT AT LEAST I WON’T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT EATING UNTIL AFTER LENT

Coquettish stick-sausage

Tue, 10 Apr 2018 11:58:28 -0400

If you’re in the market to contract a strain of hepatitis while wandering through a post-apocalyptic retirement community, you may wish to consider an afternoon in Coney Island, which was made to look gussied up when it was the setting for the movie The Warriors.

To contextualize both Coney Island and the life that I lead, last July 4th I received quite severe sunburn while standing still for two hours to watch a man named Joey Chestnuts eat 72 hotdogs in 10 minutes. I was standing so far away that I had to watch it on a big screen. I was alone. If you can picture a more tragic scene please submit it to a renowned filmmaker as it will surely win an Oscar.

Look how devastatingly far away I am from the event I went to see

Coney Island was the destination for a friend and I one recent Sunday afternoon, where he and I had an incredibly heterosexual afternoon spent wandering up and down the promenade until we actually ran out of beach, which shouldn’t technically be possible on an island but so help us if we didn’t somehow find a way.

The purpose of the afternoon was expressly to eat sausage with my incredibly hirsute friend - he’s like a human rug, if you shaved him and dumped the hair in the sea several islands in the Caribbean would cease to be - and so we set out with gay abandon, gleefully skipping to our respective local subway stations (me 4th and 9th, him Prospect-Lefferts Gardens). Anyone familiar with New York City will know that the subway functions roughly as well as a teapot made of chocolate which is a simile I just came up with I am so clever and so our 30 minute journeys took roughly 80 each. You could genuinely walk it in that time if you hustled. I could review the MTA but my face would fall off.

Also at Coney Island station there was an advert for what essentially appears to be child grooming.

Yes, you teens aged 22, here is an employment opportunity in this windowless room

Anyway, to the point that I have been so circuitously avoiding. Sausages. On this occasion we opted for covert sausages. Sausages hiding their lights under a bushel. Demure sausages. Modest soss. Coquettish sausages. Undercover nicepipes. On this occasion, we opted for:

The corndog.

The corndog is a sausage dipped in a form of batter and then fried. It should be noted here that the Nathan’s we went to to buy these is simultaneously a huge sausage flinger and a meat cylinder pioneer but also one of the worst run businesses on the face of this planet we call earth, meaning that the beautiful sausage product displayed above took 30 minutes to buy. The trains were terrible and then everyone was too inept for us to successfully purchase food. And we ran out of beach. It was a very New York day. They kept shutting the tills. We kept having to move tills. We eventually split up and occupied two tills, then my till was closed down. I lost.

This is the finest photograph ever taken of a corndog I am like a sausage Annie Liebovitz.

The corndog is a surprisingly delicious delicacy, and is also the state animal of Wisconsin. It’s smoky, it’s crispy, it accidentally pulls the sausage out when you bite into it wrong, making it look like you’re miming a lewd act with your face and a sausage on a stick when you try to put it back in. It’s a 4D experience and is well worth the physical comedy but you just have to trust me.

Would I rate this above a hotdog? This isn’t the movie Sophie’s Choice, why are you forcing me into a predicament whereby I would have to select a favorite? There is room in the world for all of these nicepipes, calm yourself down. Asking me things like that today of all days. You need a long hard look in the mirror. Good day, sir.

CURRENT LENGTH - COULDN’T MEASURE IT AS THE BATTER OBFUSCATED THE SAUSAGE SO I’M GOING TO SAY 555CM AND WE’LL ALL HAVE TO JUST BELIEVE EACH OTHER AND BE FRIENDS.

SAUSAGE RATING - IT WAS LIKE EATING CHEESE SANDWICHES FOR YEARS THEN DISCOVERING THE CHEESE TOASTIE SO 8/10

Seasonal Sausages

Sun, 07 Jan 2018 15:06:59 -0500

It has recently been the time of year where Chris Rea drives home for Christmas only to find that no one was actually expecting him, and so there aren’t any gifts for him at the house, everyone shipped them to his place, didn’t they arrive? They did? Chris, was that not a giveaway? Did you bring them with you? Why not? You really should have phoned ahead, Chris, this is actually bordering on rude at this stage.

Unlike Chris Rea, I did inform my family and people close to me that I would be home for Christmas - it wasn’t hard, Chris, I just sent a couple of emails. Have you set up your Outlook or do you need help again? Ok, later. As I was saying, I did inform people that I would be travelling back to the United Kingdom for the festive season and, what with it also being my birthday around then (don’t guess my age, I am deceptively old for someone who fastidiously monitors their sausage intake. I remember the launch and subsequent teething pains of Channel 5, if that helps) a sausage outing was in order.

‘Sausage outing’, while sounding like something to be avoided in public, is actually just a trip to have sausages. I don’t know why your mind is like it is and always goes for the gutter.

As my family live in the county of Yorkshire, we mounted our shire horses, stuffed our jackets with straw for warmth, loaded our whippets with a distaste for extravagant spending and began the four-day trip to Leeds, during which only one of us contracted Cholera, which is actually a very good outcome.

Our eventual destination was the German market in Leeds which, as it transpired, was mainly a place developed for mothers to shout at their small children al fresco rather than in the confines of their own homes. This is what it looked like:

I’m not sure why a house fire is trying to creep into my photo. I also question the decor, why are there gifts on the roof? Was Santa bamboozled by the lack of chimneys? Chris, honestly, I am doing something. I know, you can’t work Snapchat, you don’t need it now, Selena Gomez isn’t going anywhere, and if she is she’ll probably announce it, unlike some people.

We wended our way to the sausages like tube-seeking missiles and were not disappointed and nor did we explode on impact which I should have thought about when I began constructing this metaphor.

Why this takes three men I am unsure, but these gentlemen know their business and their business is putting sausages in my hand and, subsequently, mouth. I got one with cheese in. Couldn’t think of a clever way of wording that.

This was kind of not great, and I say that in case the person who made it somehow reads this. The cheese honestly tasted like Dairylea, which is fine, I like that when it’s in a triangle form, but not when it’s a golden seam running through my nicepipe. Also, how much bread? If they’re paying by weight I can save them some money by advising them to reduce the bread by about a third, I’m not at a bakery, sirs, I am at a massive barbecue buying sausages of unknown provenance that have been resting for an unclear period of time on indirect heat in the open air.

This isn’t specific to this venue, but I will never cease to be made uncomfortable by the mustard teat.

In all of humanity’s time on earth, this is the best we could come up with. We’ve walked on the moon, seen some kids drink so much Sunny Delight that they literally turned orange, recognised and dealt with the problem of moths eating our coats and yet this, a mustard teat, is the most efficient way that we have devised of dispensing mustard.

Also, Leeds Christmas Market, I want a word with you about what words mean. This, this is not a beer list. You cannot preface this with ‘beers’.

What these are, are ‘quantities’. You only sell one beer, and it was very nice and well-priced I thought, but unless ‘pint of beer’ is the new trendy name for some craft ale, stop it. (I know Marble Brewery sells a beer called pint but it doesn’t fit the bit so shut up, Chris).

All in all a strange day, in a quiet market, with a weird sausage (my nickname for my mum), a disappointing sausage (her nickname for me) and an actual sausage that was just ok. Chris, Jesus Christ, it’s written on the router. The WiFi router. Black box with blue lights. No, that’s - wait, why did you buy an Alexa?

CURRENT LENGTH - WE’RE LOOKING AT A SOLID 545CM AT THIS STAGE THAT’S LONG ENOUGH TO ENCIRCLE SOME OF A HORSE

SAUSAGE RATING - SADLY THIS WASN’T A CONTENDER AND THEREFORE I HAVE TO GIVE IT A 6/10 AND A PEP TALK.

Sausages Cooler than I

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 15:22:04 -0400

That isn’t meant to imply that I ate sausages that were not as warm as me, a human adult, because that would be disgusting. Sausages, unlike revenge, are not a dish best served cold. Like revenge, however, they are a motivator for some truly heinous acts and should be treated with the respect they deserve.

Anyway before you got me on cold sausages - really, how cold would they be? I can do room temperature? Any lower than that and it isn’t something I want anything to do with I am afraid, you will have to find another chilly sausage chump - I was going to explain the title. This title, the one that has thus far caused nothing but confusion, for which I assume partial blame, is meant to imply that I ate sausages in an environment that contained people who are more hip and trendy (and disappointingly all impossibly younger) than I am. Specifically, I met some friends in Williamsburg, Brooklyn to have a sausage session amongst pals.

I know where your mind has gone but that is your responsibility I am pure.

Rosamunde in Williamsburg is a sausage and beer establishment that is clean, will run you a Rolling Rock and a whiskey for $5, and has an extensive food brochure which apparently I’m told is now called a ‘menu’. This is the sausage situation:

The Sausage Situation is what I would call my band if I hadn’t seen this sticker.

‘Good evening Peoria, Illinois, we are Straight Up Sausage who’s ready to rock??’

This is a jar of eggs but you knew that anyway look at you.

There is a bounteous collection of meat pipes to be selected but since gout hasn’t got me yet I played it safe and just got one, I see no reason to tempt fate and anyway I drank a prodigious amount of German beers to the point where now I don’t think my body will survive Brexit.

I wasn’t that careful though because I did get a sausage with cheese in, which I think is called a kaesewurst but I’m not googling the combinations needed to discover whether that is accurate as, as I am sure you can imagine, googling to find out what a German sausage with cheese in is called will lead me to some of the internet’s darker corners.

My friend got a bratwurst with sauerkraut and onions because he fears colorful food and this is how it looked:

I can’t be sure how it was as he has his own mouth and I have mine, but he said it was good and as friendship is built on trust I have to take him at his word. You don’t have to, you don’t know him, but I would ask you to not find him and hound him.

Here’s mine:

I had the disgusting search terms wurst with sauerkraut and peppers because I am a Capricorn and we enjoy foods of that Pantone. Here is me before the action:

I had to keep my jacket on as I was wearing a Fred Perry polo and I didn’t realise that they’re what white supremacists wear and I’m not a white supremacist because that would mean I’m the master race and what a terrible world that is to imagine.

In a way I was lucky I had dressed like a racist as my jacket protected my porcelain skin from the vagaries of being totally covered in food. It was out of control, I had peppers dropping from my gaping maw like a dog who can’t work out if he likes them. Stuff was everywhere. I couldn’t control my eating functions. I had bread in my hair. Neigbouring tables were taking cover. I had no idea food could simultaneously be very good and also one of the earlier challenges on American Ninja.

The sausage itself was excellent as you would expect from somewhere with a sticker saying that the sausages are excellent. The cheese got a bit lost - feel sad for the cheese it is lost - but that was because I topped the sausage with so much shrapnel. This was a really, really good sausage, it added length to my total but it also added joy to my heart. It is becoming more and more obvious as this project continues that I have no idea how to review food. Eat there and tell me what I think about it.

CURRENT LENGTH - I WOULD SAY THIS WAS ABOUT 10CM BUT I DIDN’T MEASURE IT WAS I WAS IN TRENDY WILLIAMSBURG AND I FEAR THE REJECTION OF PEOPLE YOUNGER THAN ME WHO DON’T KNOW I EXIST SO 530CM

SAUSAGE RATING - ONE OF THE BEST I’VE HAD SO FAR 9/10

A Long Weekend of Sausage

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 16:40:45 -0400

Don’t look at me like that, it is your brain making those filthy links about that title like a bad sausage butcher also making some filthy links which I’d still eat anyway.

This past weekend, the aforementioned long weekend of sausage, I joined some friends in driving out to the countryside for a few days of pretending I didn’t grow up in Manchester and spend the subsequent 30 years happily walking on concrete and buying things in shops. No sir, I am a pretend outdoorsman and I will catch pretend things while I dress pretend appropriately.

This is me on the right, ‘in character’. I am essentially Daniel Day Lewis if he played the lead role in City Slickers. I had just chopped wood. My hands are still sore and, I think, their feelings have been hurt by the sudden betrayal of being forced to do actual work.

Luckily I wasn’t spending the weekend with Ray Mears, whose kindly, dough-face pity I couldn’t have taken. I was spending the weekend with friends who accepted me for my uselessness and also seemed as sausage-centric as I am myself (because this is America and people can be whatever they want. For more information on this and why I can’t hear you argue with me, see t-shirt above).

A very promising supermarket journey on day one (Daniel Day One if he was pretending to be part of a week) resulted in this:

An array of sausages raising coquettish eyebrows at the group. Here we have cheese sausages and beer sausages which, though I didn’t know it before, have been my favourites my entire life. They’re made by Johnsonville and were not only excellent, but also Johnsonville is kind of slang for Penistown, so I’m on board.

I overdid this one:

And also this one, as apparently being ginger for three decades has not taught me how to use sun-block like a functioning adult human.

Digressing from sausages for a second, I recommend going on holiday with friends, if you haven’t tried it. We stayed here;

Did this.

And this.

Some of this.

A lot of this.

And then rounded it off with some more sausaging.

The above are Nathan’s regular franks which normally are served not cooked over a fire, you would have to be in a Nathans’s which is on fire in order to have them served this way, and if you were in that situation you would be prioritising escape over meatpipes.. They are solid sausages, figuratively and literally, and I recommend them.

I learned so many things. Everything tastes better when cooked over a fire. One of my friends is remarkably hairy. T-shirts without sleeves but with patriotism aren’t very cooling because you feel the burning heat of America’s glow (forgive me Queen Elizabeth II) and, most of all, I learned that I like tooling around in the countryside with friends and sausages. Oh also I learned to shotgun a beer and that is the only way I drink now, so sorry also to my physician.

CURRENT LENGTH - OH YOU BEST BELIEVE I ADDED LIKE 45CM TO THE TOTAL PUTTING ME ON 520CM

SAUSAGE RATING - FLAME GRILLED MAGIC OUT OF TEN

Increasingly disappointing sausage

Mon, 27 Mar 2017 17:05:44 -0400

At this stage on my unlikely sausage journey, you would think that I’d have become impervious to feeling let down. I have eaten what looked like nightmare vomit on a moving boat, I have eaten a sausage covered in cheese in 38 degree heat (the sausage was covered in cheese, not me, but I was pretty well covered by the end of the meatpipe encounter let me tell you) and I have experienced a hidden sausage in a bread cloud very recently.

Yet still, I retain the capacity to be made downhearted by an experience with a sausage. I am not sure I worded that fantastically but there’s a gist in there so let’s all move on. I recently treated myself to a trip to the cinema to see the new King Kong movie, in which John Goodman hunts the only animal alive that is larger than him, and Samuel L. Jackson shows once and for all that there is only one old African American man working in Hollywood today.

Part of my cinematic treat was going to be one of these delicious treats that you can clearly see on display here, at a height that is either meant for children or knees.

My knees were screaming candy. My eyes, however, were drawn to this.

Do I know better? Yes. Does that mean I refrained from buying a Nathan’s hot dog at a cinema where I couldn’t see a refrigerator or any hot dogs anywhere? Also yes. Wait, no. I didn’t refrain.

Since I was running late, I asked the lady how long the hot dog would take. She said ‘two minutes’. ‘That’s a worryingly long and strangely specific time, surely it should be a case of just grabbing one from the rotating thing they have and putting it in a bun, why would that take specifically two minutes? This doesn’t sound right,’ I thought, and with that thought in mind I said ‘ok perfect, thanks’.

She disappeared into the back.

Whereupon I saw her put a sausage in this.

Disappointment creeping in, my old friend sausage remorse making him or herself comfortable. Why is the microwave in view of the customer? I don’t need that! Could they have chosen a less terrifyingly unsteady impromptu outdoor event table to hold it all up? Where’s the rotating thing hot dogs come on?

I hear a ‘ding’ and this comes at me.

How on earth – on god’s actual green earth – can a sausage sweat like that? What has happened in that microwave? If this is all about the beef as the earlier poster claimed, then I have some apologies to make, starting with this sausage and ending with every cow currently alive.

I covered the sausage juice up with sauces. Call the judges at the ‘most disgusting sentence ever written awards because I think we now have a winner.

And ran away into the theatre. In the theatre I tried to be all fun and zany, taking photos of my sausage enjoying the trailers. Oh just me and my terminally ill sausage, taking in a movie like a couple of buddies comfortable enough in each others’ company not to have to hold conversation all evening, just here to enjoy a movie, maybe a couple of beers afterwards discussing Kong’s motivation and where his genitalia is in this movie.

Then it slowly dawned on me that I was watching a trailer for a movie about the Holocaust.

There I am, merrily snapping photos of a fucking sausage with the backdrop of the worst human suffering in living memory.

Took me a while to notice as well.

This sausage didn’t have a great day with me I don’t think.

CURRENT LENGTH - IT WAS DARK AND I DIDN’T WANT TO LOOK AT IT BUT LET’S SAY 12CM GIVING ME 475CM

SAUSAGE RATING - IT’S A HUGE SIGH OUT OF TEN

Under New Management

Sun, 19 Feb 2017 15:59:35 -0500

There have been no sausage updates in recent weeks as the whole world has turned into a kind of metaphorical sausage, filled with things you didn’t expect and aren’t at all happy with but that you wish you’d understood before it came time to choose a sausage, but hey these are now the sausages we have and all we can do is stay motivated and make sure that those making the sausages hear our voices as we demand an end to anuses.

As a happy and care-free immigrant living under the current US administration, it is still my constitutional right to eat food. As long as it isn’t halal and I don’t enjoy it, I think. Things kind of change on an hourly basis these days. Today I had a nicepipe craving so I decided to satisfy it at a Hooverville structure on St. Mark’s Ave, Brooklyn.

I was warned by a friend that this was under new management, and given the recent ‘new management’ experience in this country that made me skittish and actually a bit clammy. Reasons behind clamminess unknown, but now you, I and anyone else who reads this knows that ‘clamminess’ is a word, knowledge I personally could have lived my whole life without acquiring.

The venue is the Kings Beer Hall, a German barn with benches, beers and sausages. And people, there are those too, they bring the food and drink to you, they’re integral to the experience. Here are the important parts of the menu.

And here’s a small fuck you to children who want to eat sausages.

No sausage for you, children.

I ordered the duck one. Of course I ordered the duck one instead of something that sounds real. Sitting in a badly lit faux-German aircraft hangar, looking like an accidentally normcore Ray Mears, ordering my ‘duck and fennel’ sausage and expecting it to be good because it sounds fancy. I was expecting something of bratwust proportions, a weighty duck truncheon, a solid mass of avian tube steak. What did I get?

It’s just a sausage. It is sausage-sized. For some reason the mustard is shaped like President Trump’s hair, but other than that there is nothing remarkable about it at all. Remove your wig, you disappointing cylinder. I tried to engage some of the cognitive dissonance that currently appears to be all the rage, but there was no convincing myself that this was worthy of its spot as the most expensive sausage on the menu.

Look at how lost it looks. If you’re an establishment selling sausages in bread, and you have a sausage that is negligible in comparison to your other, prouder meat soldiers, maybe buy bread specifically for the one that is going to pale into insignificance when enveloped in a hot dog bun cloud. Have it sticking out of the ends a bit, all coquettish like.

It tasted fine, a bit bready – OH WAIT THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN ALL THE BREAD I HAVE BEEN SO NAÏVE – but really, duck and fennel topped with 140,000kg of bread, some sauerkraut and some German mustard, I might have just imagined the flavour. It might have been the Bowling Green Massacre of taste.

One thing I did like was being given a pager to collect the food. Partly because I was the only one ordering and they gave me number 17 – massaged figures are very now – and partly because it made me feel like a doctor who, at any moment, might be required to give urgent assistance to a sausage. Which, in many ways, is exactly what I am.

CURRENT LENGTH - I HAD NO MEASURING TAPE SO MEASURED IT AGAINST MY EXPECTATIONS BUT THAT WASN’T FAIR SO 8CM GIVING ME 463CM

SAUSAGE RATING - WHO KNOWS I GUESS 7?

Whale sausage

Wed, 07 Dec 2016 18:14:49 -0500

I do not literally mean sausage made of whale and I have not misspelled Wales because anyway that would be ‘Welsh’ and as my grandmother is ‘Welsh’ I would ask you to kindly stop appropriating my culture. Thank you. Or, as we ‘Welsh’ say, llwfnhwefihoeainoa.

No, the whale I refer to there in the title was an actual whale. I will provide some backstory. I have a mother and I rent an apartment in a city far from that mother. That means that the mother I mentioned there is obliged by various laws to visit aforementioned apartment to make sure it meets basic safety requirements and isn’t close to areas that could lead to either my untimely death or people being rude to me.

So, my mother and stepfather recently visited me in New York and, as per NYC regulations, this meant we had to go on a boat tour. I don’t make the rules, I just abide by them zealously and aggressively.

Now, prepare yourselves ladies and gentlemen (I am being optimistic by using plurals just let me have my moment why do you come here just to pour scorn on me? I am a nice person) because the events that took place on this boat trip make up the greatest culinary travesty to take place at sea since whenever the last time shipwrecked sailors ate each other was. This might be worse. Honestly, I know, but just wait a second.

The scene of the crime

The boat tour itself was a pleasant way to spend a few hours. The guide was a little too flamboyant in his telling of New York history and avoiding eye contact with him was difficult but necessary as he one-man-showed his way through the journey waiting for someone to ask if he was a professional actor. He was, by the way, he was a professional actor. Also at one point we saw a whale in the Hudson River, in case you didn’t think the questions posed by the title would ever be resolved. It was going to play a bigger part but wow whales just don’t lend themselves to anecdotes about sausages.

I have been unkind, he was actually excellent and I recommend his tours

While the island of Manhattan passed by the boat, a different sort of manmade object caught my eye. The boat had a full menu, and on that menu was a chilli cheese dog. If ever you wondered about how my life has turned out, let the fact that my mum pointed that sausage out and said ‘you could write about that’ be your indicator.

I could write about it. And I am, currently, writing about it.

I just wish I had resisted the urge, because fucking, just…the state of it.

This tasted exactly how it looked. In future, when I say ‘this tastes like shit’ and someone responds ‘how do you know?’ my eyes will glaze over, I will look into the distance and mutter ‘some things you never forget’ and that person will cease to be my friend because the memories are too raw.

Look.

Your eyes can taste it. Somehow you can smell it and you don’t know how that’s possible. I can still smell it. That thing that you’re looking at is, in some small way, now an actual part of my physical being, I have metabolised it into muscle and fat and eye sleep and hair. My hair is made of that. Next time my barber asks me what I want I will have to just say ‘help’.

I can’t.

CURRENT TOTAL 455CM SOME REGRETS CREEPING IN
SAUSAGE RATING: 0/10 DO YOU HAVE EYES?

I have sausage block

Fri, 18 Nov 2016 12:53:32 -0500

That was meant to suggest I have writer’s block specifically pertaining to the topic of sausages but it came out as something much more disgusting and ‘came out as something much more disgusting’ is in and of itself is a very disgusting way to deal with such a sensitive title. This is all very meta.

Anyway I had visitors recently and felt that it was appropriate to give them a guided sausage tour - why does everything sound disgusting now? - so scoured my local area for sausage opportunities of which, I am delighted to report, there is an abundance. I live in a very sausage-heavy area, which is what I think Donald Trump calls his groin.

From here until the end of this post I want you to secure your sides because they are liable to split. Possibly protect your thighs from the slapping they are about to receive. Google ‘conniptions’ because you’re about to have one/some.

My guest and I went to Jake’s Handcrafted, a sausage and beer establishment a few blocks from my home, which is also a sausage and beer establishment but more intimate.

Here is the menu.

Now, the more eagle-eyed among you may have spotted something wonderful in this photograph. Above the menu that lists the innovative sausage Jake - who I would very much like to meet and discuss nicepipes with - has handcrafted, there are a series of headlines taken from newspapers about disgraced politician Anthony Weiner, a man whose sexual proclivities might have played a part in causing the next world war.

Now, this is a bit ‘fourth wall’, but I am aware that sausages and penises share a lot of characteristics. They are both roughly cylindrical, neither is considered appropriate to handle in important meetings, and both are considered powerful aphrodisiacs. I skirt around this penis issue, however the headline writers at these publications skirt right into it and dress it in that skirt, saying ‘wow look a penis dressed like a woman or a Scot, find out what it wants.’

The walls of Jake’s Handcrafted are an ode to this similarity. Look at them. Look. Look here’s more.

Can you fucking even cope? Look! ‘Weiner Bawls’ for the love of Christ. ‘Weiner: I’m Standing Firm’. ‘HIDE THE WEINER’. This, to me, is magical. From the lazy ‘Little Weiner’ to the subtlety of ‘The Brief on Weiner’, this wall belongs in a museum so that future generations who have no concept of Anthony Weiner can feast upon this generation’s pinnacle. Here is the high water mark for the 2000′s. Look at it for actual fuck’s sake:

I am undone.

Sausage-wise, Jake’s is excellent - again, that sentence doesn’t sit right - with a wide range of meats and an innovative approach to tubes. I had the twice smoked brisket sausage, because hello gout make yourself at home in my toes.

It came with bread which wasn’t the right bread but was undeniably bread and some pickles they make on-site. I don’t know if pickles can taste fresh though so that might have been a ruse.

They were also cooked by a very friendly lumberjack who either doesn’t realise there are no trees in Brooklyn or is directly responsible for that fact.

No joke, the condiments included banana mustard. It was delicious. Honestly, if you want penis jokes and sausages I don’t think I have been to a place that combines the two to such a high standard. Chapeau, Jake.

CURRENT TOTAL 447CM LONGER THAN A FAMILY PEOPLE CARRIER
SAUSAGE RATING: 9/10 PROBABLY THE BEST SO FAR ON THIS JOURNEY

Never meet your heroes

Mon, 24 Oct 2016 17:14:05 -0400

Unless I am your hero in which case that is very nice of you and yes, of course I would be thrilled to meet you, but I would have serious questions to ask you about how you view your aspirations. Regardless, we’d have a great time and probably be good friends for life, so just think about it. I’m not saying do it, I’m just saying think about it.

Anyway this post isn’t about heroes, it’s about sausages. Ignore the fact that I’m contradicting my own title and look at this email I received from Tumblr just three days ago.

I don’t know why they went with a cake, really I don’t, but the thought is nice. This means I have been increasing my sausage distance for longer than a human child gestates, and in fact am over 50% of the way to an elephant’s gestation period, and that is the Cadillac of gestation.

To celebrate this milestone, I wanted to go to a famous sausage slinger, a round-steak wrangler of repute, and so I Googled those words and got nothing, so just went to Papaya King in Brooklyn.

It seems counter-intuitive to buy sausages from a fruit king, but I was assured that monarchs can have more than one talent, so in we went.

From here, everything went completely to shit. Wrong-footed by the lustrous décor and also disgusted by the mental image of this sign:

I won’t save a napkin, King Papaya, because I am not walking out of here with spitty hands am I? Who do you think you are? Telling a foreign visitor to clean their hands using their own mouth? And having that sign above a bin? If your papaya kingdom is so flimsy it can’t support a healthy napkin habit then you have bigger things going on and maybe should be focusing on your people rather than your papayas.

Anyway the ordering process made me feel more like an Englishman in hostile territory than any other experience I’ve had in New York City so far. I ordered a ‘classic’, and the lady behind the counter whose fault this wasn’t (LBTCWFTW) responded ‘a classic what?’ I was stymied. Why is something called a classic if further discussion is needed as to what that means? Why is it called ‘the’ classic? Why am I stuck to the floor? Is there a Papaya Prime Minister?

What followed was a minute and a half of me miming desperately, pointing at signs and sometimes my own mouth, begging LBTCWFTW to give me some food and end this socially awkward contemporary dance performance. Eventually, somehow, I ended up with this.

What you see there is not a fucking classic. What you see there is two classics, and a soft drink, which I somehow bought. I did not want two sausages, I did not want that one there with whatever that brown shit is on it. In a way I was glad to have successfully ordered something. In another way, I was incredibly disappointed at my inability to communicate that I want a sandwich, in a shop that primarily sells sandwiches.

And I missed with the fucking mustard as well.

This was the worst sausage-based project birthday I have ever had. The sausages were bad, the toppings confusing and saddening, the bread was definitely bread I can’t fault you there your Highness but all in all, this was an incredibly disappointing experience. I don’t know what I was expecting from a place that recommends you lick your hands clean like a bald cat, but I think this was about right.

Look at this prick, honestly.

CURRENT TOTAL 437CM 99% OF THEM NICE ONES
SAUSAGE RATING: 2/10 I WILL NOT LICK MY HANDS SIR