Burnt Sausages and Guitars (not carrots this time!)

This morning, my wife and I decided to have breakfast in the local mall, full English (even though she is Scottish). It’s not often we do this but this particular establishment does real bacon, not the beef or turkey variety normally found here. One of the other ingredients was a beef sausage.

Although the sausage was cooked perfectly adequately, it still had a pinkish appearance on the skin. Now when it comes to sausages I’m more of a ‘the blacker the better’ type person, and this set me wondering why.

A couple of years ago, when I was in my early to mid teens (okay, a couple of decades ago…alright, alright…almost half a century ago!), several us used to get together, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the evening, and head for the ‘rocks’.

Now I need to explain this. The ‘rocks’ was not part of the seashore – we were forty miles inland. Behind my parents’ house used to be a railway shunting yard. Nothing big, but it had been the local goods yard, now disused. To create the space for this a section of hillside was blasted out revealing a sandstone rock face. At either end a steep grassy slope led up to the top and it was here we used to head. It was an open space with a good view along the valley.

You might ask why teenagers were interested in clambering up here for the view. You’re right, that’s not why we went. We used to go armed with a pack or two of sausages, some potatoes, a box of matches, BBQ lighting fluid, a stack of wood and our guitars.

Fire duly lit, the potatoes would be wrapped in foil and put in the base of the fire and the sausages stabbed with a stick in a manner that would please even Vlad the Impaler.

Over the course of several hours we would consume a large number of the delicacies, which were somewhat charred on the outside and almost raw in the centre (patience was not a strong point as a teenager. I don’t list it as one of my attributes even these days). The potatoes, strangely enough, turned out to be the same. In-between attempts at the culinary arts, we would play the guitars and sing songs. There is something magical about music in the open especially when sitting around a fire with friends. Memories are made of these things.

To this day, I much prefer to sing and play outside (I still do both badly), and sausages are underdone if they don’t resemble a charcoal brick. Just goes to show how some things can shape our future, even though at the time they don’t seem that significant.