Let me not become involved even as observer in the re-re-negotiation, oh no. But a central issue jumped up and hit me, to wit the ‘resonance’ of Cumberland sausages.
You may have all your gadgets primed to go dark at a whisper of Brexit, chief British negotiator Lord Frost, the European Union. But you cannot have avoided logging the EU putting it up to Frost by saying it’s the people of Northern Ireland they mostly want to convince. People who sell stuff, and the deeper meaning that some of this stuff has.
‘Sausages’ as a significant element of community identity; discuss. Cumberland sausages, moreover, dull to my taste but then I’ve just eaten them without noticing did they resonate. (That couldn’t be good in a sausage, could it?)
Last Wednesday the London Times ran a QandA– modern ploy to hold readers with shrunken attention spans - on the protocol and the likely EU proposals. The Times expert said Chief EU Brexit negotiator Maros Sefcovic ‘was likely to suggest a new exemption allowing unhindered access for British products that played a part in the “national identity” of communities.’ In other words, to allow the continued export of sausages to Northern Ireland when the current grace period ends.
That’s British sausages, perhaps Great British sausages. Who knew, until the unpleasantness of six letters starting with ‘B’ and ending with ‘t’ played out, or this past fortnight, that NI supermarket sausages held such a place in anyone’s heart? I’m guessing nobody knew because nobody cared. What do you bet that no post-mortem was ever going to find ‘British sausage’ engraved on anyone’s heart? Post-mortems on many’s a heart, true, might implicate ‘sausage’, a foodstuff warned of by dieticians and docs for decades and yet clung to by many of us. But place of origin, would that be in the coronary readout? Well, perhaps.
Once the great British banger filled a fluffy paragraph or three by inventor of Euro-myths then very highly-paid columnist Boris Johnson; not as funny as his misshapen cucumbers and straight bananas. Once all that mainland Europe knew of these fatty cylinders was that they consisted largely of unidentifiable meat. Mean minds whispered that this was what the sausage-machines rejected, ‘recovered meat’. Then came the fear for chill cabinets, political sentiment.
Let us not sectarianise this, political football though it has become. (Sausages as footballs, bad to wurst.)
Some across the tribes delight in old-fashioned Tyrone sausages. The Pork Shop on Sandy Row pulled in crowds. Butchers costly and less so all over the place have for ages made their own sausages and old white heads among us remember very fine sausages lovingly smuggled from Dublin. Hafner’s; you didn’t have to call yourself Irish to love Hafner’s – the sausage-makers originally German?
You don’t have to be a unionist to miss sausages shipped from England, though clearly it helps. But also mystifies. What are these sausages on which your identity depends, Sir Jeffrey? What’s wrong with local ones? Perhaps this has been the stuff of tireless interrogation, a major thread in recent politics programmes. Those of us sustaining calm and optimism on a pandemic TV diet of Montalbano or Strictly Come Dancing have missed the questioning, proper and searching though it has no doubt been.
On the other hand there’s something fishy (no! no! Not fishy sausages!) about this whole affair. Is it possible that in a state of pre-existing wrath men who rarely if ever shop for their households – middle-aged and older unionist politicians, I’m looking at you – half-listened to the women who feed them, heard a Brexiteer supermarket boss warning this or that might become scarce, and dredged up the memory of Boris and his bangers. Here we are, snozzengers no longer just sausages.
Home bakeries and good sausages, the two things unionism’s ‘wee country’ had going for it. And a fatty British banger strips the local sausage of its gold rosette.
