Sausage Quest

Pig Hands (No Body)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

英文互译镜像站

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