It came to me (as all good things do) while lolling in the hammock and watching the clouds go by:
Why, I wondered, (why?) is there no Sausage Fest?
There are plenty of sausage fests, obviously. Just pop into an online sexy chat room or a real-life Laser Quest and you’ll probably see one. But I’ve never heard of an actual Sausage Fest.
It’s so obvious.
Sausage Fest 2014 would be a massive village fate or food festival completely dedicated to sausages.
As well as various sausage-tasting marquees and meat grinder demonstrations and Noble History of Everyone’s Favourite Offal Format displays, you could have sausage-related fun and games like Sausage Wanging, Guess the Weight of the Sausage, Chipolata Bobbing, and (of course) Hide The Sausage.
“Name That Meat” could be a fun carnival game in which you pay a pound to studiously nibble a diskette of sausage and shout “pork!” only for a carny dressed as a butcher to pull surprising words like “stoat” and “chickpeas” from golden envelopes.
You could spend many a fine hour playing Find the Sausage In the Haystack, impress your date with Sausage Test Your Strength, take in a Highland Games-style Sausage Toss and (for the kids) Pin the Sausage on the Donkey.
Good clean fun.
I’d draw the line at running a Punch and Judy Show. You wouldn’t want to stir the attendees up too much with the idea of sausage theft. Festival Security are going to have a hard enough time as it is.
Over in the live entertainment quarter, you could have sausage-related bands like Grinderman, Longpigs, The Jazz Butcher, and of course Sausage. £35 entry, SJs (Sausage Jockeys) after midnight.
Absolutely no Richard Bacon.
If budget permits (and why wouldn’t it? This’ll be a smash) you could have other stages like middle-brow sausage poetry, sausages of the world, sausage burlesque, and a stand-up comedy tent for sausage-based jokes (though I for one can’t come up with any).
Given the name “Sausage Fest”, I wouldn’t want people getting the wrong idea about it. To make sure there’s no confusion, we’ll have hunks in lederhosen giving out knockwursts at the door.
After a few years, you’d start getting well-seasoned sausage crusties who remember how Sausage Fest was better in the old days, before the new fence was put up. The new fence is not in the spirit of Sausage Fest (even if, as an electrified fence, it happens to be useful for cooking sausages on) and neither are those new corporate big-brand bacon marquees you get now. Sausage Fest used to be about the sausages. Now it’s just about American-style weenie roasts and feeding the capitalist sausage machine.
But for now, it’s such a good idea. Who wouldn’t come to Sausage Fest? The advertising campaign is a no-brainer. Unlike some of the sausages.
We should immediately open an Olympics-style bidding process for the city or county best equipped to host it. This will be little more than a formality, obviously. I think we all know who’s going to host it. Cumberland.
Hamburg, Worcestershire and Brussels already have things going on with Burgerstock, Camp Saucy, and Sprout Fest.
As a vegetarian of course, I will be protesting Sausage Fest. And as a writer I must object to any sausage-based puns and innuendo. No, Sausage Fest is not something this writer could get behind.