In his novel Coming up for Air (1939), George Orwell has his benighted protagonist, George Bowling, bite into a sausage, only to discover that it tastes of something else altogether: ‘…pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish!’
I thought of George Bowling as my disgruntled family sat outside Felbrigg Hall in North Norfolk last week, eyeing me balefully — and I envied him. At least his sausage tasted of something. For I had just spent £43.40 on five sausage rolls and five cans of (soft) drink from a converted horsebox. I expected, for that extraordinary price, some sort of artisanal snack made from the sort of pampered pigs who produce the porcine equivalent of Wagyu beef.
Our hopes weren’t high when five flaky factory-farmed slices that Greggs would have been embarrassed to sell were delivered to our table. My husband – a connoisseur of all things pig – took one for the team and bit into his first. He gagged. But it was a cold day, and we were all hungry after a walk and a morning’s lambing at the farm on the estate, so bravely followed him.
Like George Bowling’s sausage, ‘a sort of horrible soft stuff’ oozed out; a grey slurry — the culinary equivalent of AI slop. It was the most revolting, ersatz sausage meat made of God-knows-what, hosed off the abattoir floor and adulterated with wallpaper paste. I’d have put the meat content at somewhere between three and five per cent.
‘Just wash away the taste with some Fanta, darling’ I advised, while my husband encouraged us to bolt it as quickly as possible. If only I could have bought a double espresso to nuke my palate — but I swore off National Trust coffee a long time ago. It has a foul, burnt aftertaste — probably the closest equivalent is Mrs Miggins’s ‘brown water with grit in it’ from Blackadder the Third.
Things have come to a pretty pass when the food sold by Britain’s premier heritage charity makes you feel jealous of a fictitious character in a novel about revulsion of the state of the nation and the impending doom of war. George Bowling’s fishy sausage gives him the feeling that he’d ‘bitten into the modern world and discovered what it was really made of’.
Well, I’ve bitten into a National Trust sausage roll and discovered what the UK’s largest conservation charity is about — and it’s contempt. Take the snack stand at Hill Top, Beatrix Potter’s old house at Near Sawrey in the Lake District, part of her bequest to the Trust (along with 4,000 acres, 15 farms and her flock of pedigree Herdwick sheep). We were there at Easter a few years ago and it is a charming place, my then very young children scampering around to find the exact locations of some of the drawings in her books.
An independent café was providing the food, so we ordered coffee in safety (we thought) and sausage rolls which are — or should be — just the thing on a cold, blustery day when Easter falls early in the year.
‘They’re vegan sausage rolls, yeah, is that ok?’ said the woman. ‘This is a vegan café.’
‘Yuck,’ said my eldest son. His younger brother began to cry.
My husband, who has endured several of my tantrums at National Trust properties over the years began to steer me away. Such tantrums include: a board at Chartwell referring to Churchill’s ‘passing’; an asinine sign in the magnificent library at Lanhydrock in Cornwall asking, ‘But aren’t books boring?’ (particularly memorable since I was heavily pregnant with my daughter at the time).
We know the contempt with which the National Trust treats its benefactors — viz their rewilding of the Lakeland landscape that Beatrix Potter stipulated should be preserved for the grazing of her beloved Herdwick sheep. See also their 2020 report into colonialism and slavery links at 93 of their properties which fingered Churchill who, like so many of the people who made the organisation what it is, had the frightful misfortune to be born in the past.
The National Trust was ahead of its time with its Starmerite view of agriculture and the countryside
One of the problems with the National Trust is that it wants to be more ‘diverse and inclusive’ by ‘improving representation in the outdoors from the global majority’ (think non-white people) and people in Hackney made entirely of ear-stretchers and bile, but its core membership is old and white. Doris and Clive tucking into their non-binary jacket potatoes with rainbow salad and supermarket cheddar are oblivious to the contortions the National Trust performs as it apologises itself out of existence for its elitism and custodianship of places tainted not only by sugar money but also by their unfortunate situation in remote parts of the countryside which are impossible to access by public transport.
The National Trust was ahead of its time with its Starmerite view of agriculture and the countryside, failing to see their relevance to the economy and even banning trail-hunting and some grouse shooting on its land. As for the food substitutes it serves, for a charity supposedly in the business of conservation to sell nasty, artificial pap — when it should be using locally-reared organic produce — well, it’s almost Orwellian. Given that the National Trust has been losing members hand over fist, they might do well to read Orwell’s essay on English cooking: ‘We are not likely to succeed in attracting tourists while England is thought of as a country of bad food.’
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