ENGLISH MUM: never knowingly undercatered

The Disreputable One likes nice food. When we were little, we were lucky enough (although totally unappreciative, I’m sure) to eat proper food at home, produced with love by my doting Ma from scratch, and to be taken to nice restaurants. We were even allowed a little teeny soupçon of wine (diluted, natch). He was always immensely disparaging about our teenage obsession with burgers and fast food. I remember he used to wind us up and say that stuff like sausages and burgers were made up of ‘lips and arseholes’. It became a bit of a family joke.

So when I saw the The F Word the other night I thought instantly of my Dad. He’s quite like Gordon Ramsey, really. He’s a stroppy sod sometimes and he doesn’t take any prisoners, but he doesn’t give a toss what people think of him and for some reason I always reckon that’s a pretty admirable quality: being true to yourself no matter what. Anyhoo, I read somewhere that ol’ Gordo bought Tana an Audi R8 for Christmas so he’s okay in my book.

Oops, digressing. They were talking, amongst other things, about sausages. Poor J, our houseguest, had to leave the room as he likes a sausage and didn’t want to hear all the gory details. Basically, though, they tested a load of different sausages and talked about their meat content and what exactly this ‘meat’ consists of. Now I’m a realist and I’m fully aware that if you buy something from a supermarket’s ‘Value’ or ‘Economy’ range, it’s not going to have the best ingredients, but even so, the results were pretty shocking. I can’t find it anywhere on the web, but Tesco’s Value Sausage came out the worst, containing, if my memory serves me correctly, the minimum allowance of 32% meat, a quarter of which when tested was found to be sinew, connective tissue, gristle, rind and various other crap. Yum.

So who’d have thought it, after all these years it turns out that The Disreputable One was right: lips and arseholes it is!