I fear the humble sausage could lead us to war
From time to time there is a scare story that the EU has plans to outlaw the British sausage. This immediately leads to a mass outbreak of national indignation and headlines saying “Hands Off Our Banger”.
We surely understand, therefore, how the people of Kyrgyzstan felt when a British man, working in their country, was rude on Facebook about their national delicacy, the horsemeat sausage named the
chuchuk. Michael McFeat, from Perthshire, was actually arrested under Kyrgyzstan race-hate laws.
This shows that, for many people, the sausage is an important part of their national identity. We, too, would be offended if a visitor from Bishkek (the capital of Kyrgyzstan) came over here and belittled our chipolatas. Indeed, if anyone were to tweet unkind things about the Prince of Wales’s Duchy Original organic pork and herb sausages made from outdoor reared, wellmannered, rare breed, ethical pigs, there might be a case for charging him with treason.
There are so many ways to give offence. A proud and haughty Spaniard will not allow you to disrespect the chorizo and it is easy to re-open old wounds with a German simply by pronouncing
bratwurst in the overdone accent of an SS officer in an old war film. If you spurn a Frenchman’s boudin he may belabour you with an andouillette. In fact, I think it would be only a slight exaggeration to say that the sausage may soon replace oil as the cause of conflict in the world. It could be just a small incident that leads to Armageddon; there may be the sausage equivalent of the shots fired at Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914. It could all start with a small territorial dispute, say a claim that the Polish sausages are taking up too much shelf space in a supermarket, pushing aside the Italian salamis. T S Eliot was so right when he said the world would end, not with a wimp but a banger. In his Doctor’s Diary last week, James Le Fanu mentioned the OSKE test, or the One Step Knicker Entry Test. This is a way to assess the effect of ageing on your sense of balance and general mobility. You see if you can stand on one leg and bend the other leg sufficiently to get it through the appropriate hole in the pants. This test should be performed first with one leg, then with the other.
I have developed some other ways of seeing how age is creeping up. The first is the Undone Shoelace Test. You are walking along a street and you discover your shoelace is undone. Can you bend down and retie it without toppling over, or do you decide to walk on for a hundred yards or so to find some convenient doorstep to place your foot on? Perhaps, like me, you decide to carry on walking about with a flapping lace until you can get home and change into slippers.
There is also the Stepladder Test. A year ago, panic began to set in when you reached the fifth step; now you are getting serious doubts on the second one. And standing on a chair to change a light bulb has become a daredevil feat. Do you find, when you are lying in the bath, you no longer spend the time in soapy daydreaming, but concentrate on working out your exit strategy?
The most conclusive is the ES (Elusive Statin) test. You are taking your pills, and a statin pings out of the blister pack and flies on to the floor. Do you crawl about under the table to look for it? Or, bearing in mind how tiny it is, the state of your eyesight, the condition of your knees and the dizzy spell you will get when you stand up again, do you decide to forget all about it? Thought so. My fashion correspondent Jeanie Wizz, the plugged-in blogger, writes: “Definitely, the next big thing in men’s fashion is the Leo Tolstoy look. It’s all about huge epaulettes and loads of gold braid. We gals used to drool over hunks with bare chests and scythes, but that Cornish thing is so passé. Now we’re into Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky who looks so bonkable in his too-tight military jacket with its uncomfortably high collar. Yes, I’m talking about dishy
War and Peace.
“It’s an unbeatable combo – all those swoony Imperial Russian officers looking so hot in all that snow. My advice to Vladimir Putin is: stop flexing your pecs, cover up and get the look. Buy a swishy cavalry officer’s sword, button up tight and cover yourself with gold braid.”