Men of destiny, don’t you just love them?

A man of destiny, bearing the divine summons, to lead us to the uplands
And, lucky Brits, we can choose either Jezza or BoJo

Right now in Britain, the big question is what to do with the clear majority in parliament against a hard Brexit, almost certainly reflecting a similar majority in the country at large.

I say ‘almost certainly’ since no one knows for sure. That’s because there’s such resistance to the notion of asking the electorate again whether, after three years of this chaos, they really still want to go ahead with Brexit at all.

Funnily enough, the people most against asking that question are the Brexiters. It’s almost as though they feared they might get an answer they didn’t like. It has to be said that they’re the ones always saying we should respect the will of the people, so it’s a little curious that they don’t want to check what that will is.

For those of us who think it was a mistake to set out down this road in the first place, our last chance to do something about it is to stop our new Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, taking us directly to the no-deal Brexit he’s threatening. One of the imaginative ways to achieve that is to bring down the government – it has a majority of one in the House of Commons, so it could be done – and replace it with a government of national unity.

The problem is that the political opposition in Britain is split between a tiny minority that believes that the only person who could lead such a government is the current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the vast majority who think that he’d be hopeless. Especially hopeless at stopping Brexit because most of us suspect that at heart he remains a Brexiter himself.

Unfortunately, the tiny minority that supports him currently runs the Labour Party, which is the major party of Opposition. That doesn’t do much for the prospects of building a unity government.

Corbyn won’t stand aside. He claims this is because he’s a genuine socialist, while everyone else is just a lackey of capitalism, so what Britain truly needs right now is a government led by him. Unfortunately, some of us, perhaps rather cynically, believe that what really motivates him is that after 32 years spent on the backbenches of parliament, with never any prospect of his holding anything like power, he’s suddenly seen that he might be able to take the highest office in the land. Before, the only future he could see was a few more years as a protest politician no one very much had heard of and then retirement with a few million pounds and a generous pension, but now he can see Downing Street. The bug has bitten him. He feels it’s his right, now. He feels entitled.

In that respect, he strongly resembles his opposite number, Johnson. Of course, Johnson has much more experience of feeling entitled, having attended England’s most prestigious private school, Eton, before going to Oxford where he was a leading light in the Bullingdon Club. That was a group of super-wealthy students that made a habit of trashing restaurants or other students’ rooms, safe in the knowledge that one or other of the ‘daddies’ would be around the next day to pay for the damage.

With a background like that, what else could he imagine than that he was entitled to the greatest consideration the country could give him, and had only to wait for it to fall into his lap? Since the premiership now has, he must feel entirely vindicated in that belief.

Corbyn has less reason than Johnson to feel such things are his birthright. I imagine that he feels he’s earned it. That only means that Johnson believes he has a right to Downing Street despite having been a less than impressive Mayor of London and a downright catastrophic Foreign Secretary, whereas Corbyn, who’s never been anything very much, thinks he’s earned the same right by dint of doing nothing of great significance for a very long time (he’s 70).

Talking to his supporters, it’s clear that they, and Corbyn himself, think that he’s a man of destiny. Were they not mostly atheists, they’d probably see him as a man chosen by God to lead the British – his (God’s) chosen people – to the sunlit uplands. Since these are people whose roots are in the forties, seen as the golden age of the Labour Party, the uplands are presumably those of that time, when everyone was happy, healthy and rich. As so well chronicled in George Orwell’s novels.

It has to be said that Boris thinks exactly the same of himself. He too is the man of destiny who will lead the British to their sunlit uplands, although in his case, his nostalgia is for the days of Empire, back in Victorian times, when everyone was happy, healthy and rich. As so well chronicled in Charles Dickens’ novels.

Both men of destiny. Both ready to lead us to those fabled uplands. Guided by an inspiration nothing short of divine.

Just not from the same God.

When Memory Lane took me to Never Land

It must, I suspect, be my age that keeps driving me back down Memory Lane.

On my trip to London this week, I stayed in a hotel in Kensington. West Kensington, I should add, not the really fashionable bit. But even so, I wandered down a few charming Mews or around squares lush with leaves and with their private park in the middle, and saw how privilege is still doing just fine in Britain, Brexit or no Brexit, recession or no recession.

Quiet elegance in Kensington
How the other 1% live

The hotel was also within walking distance of Hyde Park. This is the biggest park in London, although technically only one end of it is actually Hyde Park: all the western bit is called Kensington Gardens. For a walker wandering around it, however, it all feels like one colossal extent of glorious greenery, with its fountains and even its lake, the Serpentine. Except that when Hyde Park gives way to Kensington Gardens, the lake changes name too, just to confuse visitors. It becomes the Long Water.

The Long Water. Looking towards the Serpentine

It occurred to me that I really didn’t know Hyde Park at all well. Mostly I only go there for demonstrations, and then only to the far eastern end. Then I trail along the side of the park and through the streets of London with a million or two others, doing our damnedest to stop damn fool acts like the Iraq War or Brexit. Quite why we bother isn’t clear to me, since we hardly achieved our aim on those occasions.

This time I went for two or three walks in the park and made a point of acquainting myself with some of the bits I’d never been to, or not been to for a long time. I went to see the Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Playground, dedicated as the name implies to the memory of the person the French persist in referring to as “Leddi Di”. It looked like a fairly impressive playground but not that different from ones I’d seen elsewhere. Euro Disney it certainly wasn’t.

The Diana Pricess of Wales Memorial Fountain was also pleasant, but hardly breathtaking. And, because the designers had clearly decided not to let go of the theme once they’d got hold of it, they’re linked by a Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Path which is probably the best of the three, but only because a long path through fine parkland is always attractive.

None of these things, however, were my real objective in going to the park. I wanted to go, or rather go back, to the Peter Pan statue. Somewhere deep in my somewhat misty memory was a recollection of my parents taking my brother and me there when I was about eight, and telling me on the way that it was absolutely marvellous and evocative of the whole world of Never Land.

I couldn’t remember whether, once I’d stood before the statue, I’d felt any of that magic, and I wanted to get back to see what feelings it would awake in me.

You can imagine, I wanted to see whether I’d experience a sense of poignancy, of nostalgia, of the lost wonder of childhood, particularly as the parents who’d taken us to see Pan have both since gone to their graves. My wife always laughs at the way that I can spring a tear over a rom com. Here was a heaven-sent opportunity to indulge all my mawkish sentimentalism to the full.

Finally, I got there. And stood before the pleasant little statue, bits of which, like any bronze sculpture, had been rubbed by thousands of hands to gleam yellow. And what did it evoke in me?

Peter Pan. Rediscovered at last

Well, to be honest, nothing at all. No tingle of nostalgia. No pricking of the eyelids at long-distant recollections of childhood.

In fact, I couldn’t remember the anything about my previous visit to it at all.

Lives overheard

One of the benefits of there being so many mobile phones around, is that you hear all sorts of tantalising titbits of conversation as you walk along the streets of a city.

In London the other day I caught:

“So you’re saying the watch I picked up wasn’t yours?”

Now, what could that be about? Did his friend send him back to the office to collect the watch he’d left on a desk, and he’d taken someone else’s, meaning he now had two colleagues lamenting the loss of a timepiece?

Or it could be worse than that. Maybe he went back to the café where his friend had left his watch, saw one, collected it and shot back out thinking he was doing his friend a favour, only to discover that he’d taken the watch of an innocent customer who’d only just removed the watch from his wrist to rest it. That customer had since reported the theft to the police, providing them with an excellent description of the culprit, further reinforced by crystal-clear security camera footage.

I did hear a siren approaching as I went past, so I moved away quickly rather than witness the arrest of an unfortunate individual, guilty only of good if misdirected intentions.

Only to walk around the corner and hear a young woman, striding up Exhibition Road, proclaiming loudly:

“You can throw me under a tube.”

For those possibly not familiar with London, the tube is the underground railway that criss-crosses the city. To be thrown under one would not be a life-enhancing experience.

The usual expression is ‘throw me under a bus’...

...but under a tube would be more certainly terminal

So what terrible catastrophe had overtaken her? Had she been denied promotion by a scheming colleague who had secured a post, by rights hers, and whom she was now challenging to finish her life altogether, since he had already irreparably damaged her career prospects?

Or was she talking to her now ex-boyfriend, who had dumped her for her sister, heaping humiliation on top of harm? Bereft even of family support, since she had already been abandoned by her parents for her terrible choice of lover, she had now been betrayed by her own sibling.

Indeed, she might have been talking to the very sister. No wonder she felt that being thrown under a train would be a perfectly reasonable next step in the progression of disasters afflicting her.

But I think the finest titbit I overhead came from an anxious young man saying:

“You mean, he saw me leaving this morning?”

Well, I could construct some plausible circumstances that might lead to that kind of statement. But is it worth it? I’m sure you can find your own easily enough. And they probably wouldn’t be very different from any conjecture I might come up with.

Ubiquitous mobile phones? At least they add spice to a stroll through London. And a little exercise for the imagination.

Do we need more spies? And more traitors?

Treason is a terrible offence. Why, even after the British abolished the death penalty for murder, one of the few offences for which it was retained was high treason. That was the case until the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into British law finally did away with capital punishment altogether. But I suspect most of us still think of betrayal as one of the basest of crimes.

Perhaps the most notorious of British traitors, and the most fascinating, is Kim Philby. For the best part of thirty years, he was an agent of the Soviet Union's KGB, who was deeply embedded inside Britain’s own secret intelligence service, MI6. Any information of importance known to MI6 was immediately known to the KGB too. Since James Jesus Angleton, then a rising star of the CIA, was in the habit of confiding pretty much everything he knew to Philby, that meant that most of the CIA’s secrets were also being shared with the KGB.

Some of the missions Philby betrayed inspire little sympathy in me. 

For instance, I have no time for joint MI6 and CIA operations which sent young Albanian men being to their home country, to carry out actions that would be most generously described as sabotage, more harshly as terrorism, in order to weaken the Communist regime and ultimately foment an uprising against it. On the other hand, I find it somewhat nauseating that every single one of those missions was betrayed by Philby. Possibly 200 of these young men were captured and put to death, often in the most atrocious way. Even worse, the number rises to some 2000 when you include the friends and relatives, and even the unfortunates who happened to share the same surname as a captive, who suffered the same fate.

What Philby did was by no means pretty. But there’s no doubt that he showed a lot of guts and ingenuity, with which he turned MI6 inside out, and made some of the most senior figures in the CIA look pretty silly too. It’s a remarkable story, extremely well told by Ben MacIntyre in his book A Spy Among Friends. The title neatly expresses the thinking that put Philby above suspicion among people, his friends from childhood, who ran the secret service and regarded him as ‘one of us’.

Oleg Gordievsky in 1994
Photo from The Times

MI6 wasn’t, however, without its riposte to the KGB for Philby. In his latest book, The Spy and the Traitor, Ben MacIntyre tells another story, rather less well-known than Philby’s but fully as compelling. In Oleg Gordievsky, MI6 recruited its own double agent, deep within the KGB – he ended up with the rank of colonel – who was Philby’s mirror image, ostensibly serving the KGB, in reality betraying its secrets to British intelligence.

The book is well worth reading, an excellent tale of intrigue, peril, betrayal and loyalty. But one of the most interesting stories it tells is of the visit by Mikahil Gorbachev, then the newly appointed General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, to Britain in 1984. It was one of the most successful, and above all cordial, visits by a Soviet leader to the West. Maggie Thatcher, then British Prime Minister, declared that Gorbachev was someone with whom the West “could do business”.

At the time, Gordievsky, by then a well-established MI6 agent, was head of the political intelligence department in the KGB station (rezidentura) in London. This put him in a pivotal position for the visit. As MacIntyre explains:

As head of political intelligence in the rezidentura, he would be responsible for briefing Moscow on what Gorbachev should expect; as a British agent, he would also be briefing MI6 on Russian preparations for the visit. Uniquely in intelligence history, a spy was in a position to shape, even choreograph, a meeting between two world leaders, by spying for, and reporting to, both sides.

Ben MacIntyre and his excellent book on Gordievsky

The same man was briefing both the British and the Soviets. And far from leading to the collapse of the talks, it ensured their success. Unlike Philby, Gordievsky betrayed no one to his death. But in this operation, as in several others that were nearly as significant, he did a great deal more than Philby to advance the cause the Soviet agent claimed to serve: making the world a safer place. And yet Gordievsky was just as assuredly committing treason.

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? Perhaps the greatest danger to world peace is state secrecy. And one of the best ways of countering that danger is to have talented spies betraying those secrets, effectively and repeatedly.

Treason is a terrible crime. But, paradoxically, maybe we need rather more spies keeping everyone informed of what everyone else is doing. 

And rather more traitors, not fewer.

The mystery of the vanishing Vermouth

Vermouth, I always thought, was rather a banal mixer, used with gin, and predominantly by people in spy movies saying pretentious things like ‘shaken not stirred’. Or, as a spoof film we recently saw had it, ‘pour a stiff gin and show it to a bottle of Martini but so it can’t see the label, and without even taking the top off’.

In fact, I didn’t make much of a distinction between Vermouth in general and Martini in particular. And since I associated it with large quantities of gin, far from my favourite tipple, I really didn’t think that much of it.

It turns out that in our new home city, Valencia, Vermouth is a matter of local pride. Not the kind produced by Martini, though. Here, many bars and restaurants pride themselves on producing their own home-made variety. It’s made of reinforced wines in which various spices and herbs have been allowed to steep. It’s sweet, too, so if, unlike me with my every-so-slightly excessive weight, you have no sweet tooth, then you may not like Valencian Vermouth as much as I do. But I reckon it’s still worth trying.

Huevos Alto Turia, our local organic shop
It has an enticing feel to it

Around the corner from us is an organic food shop which does great local produce. You know – all sorts of nuts and seeds and special breads and free-range eggs. They – I don’t know why I say ‘they’ since it’s very much a one-woman show – she will also order bottles of a local Vermouth from a friendly supplier. Tell her in the morning and she’ll have them by the evening at the latest.

I told her yesterday, because her Vermouth is one I particularly enjoy. But I left it overnight before I went to collect the three bottles I’d asked her for.

“They were here just an hour and a half after you asked for them,” she told me with a note of unmistakeable pride in her voice.

I thanked her and paid for the bottles, then loaded them into the rucksack I’d brought for the purpose. Back home, I dumped the rucksack on a chair by the dining table and took two bottle out to transfer to the storage room where we keep such things. Then I went back to the dining table and noticed, to my horror, that the rucksack was empty.

The rucksack. And just two bottles

What could have happened?

Danielle was recently robbed in Madrid. She was wearing one of those rucksack-style handbags and two young women had come up close behind her, whipped the rucksack open and grabbed her purse. We noticed them in time to stop them taking anything else, but the purse was gone, never to be heard of again.

Had the same thing happened to me?

Valencia always strikes me as a relatively safe place, with little crime. But that’s not the same as no crime. Perhaps I hadn’t been careful enough about zipping up the rucksack and someone, sneaking up behind me, had seen the single bottle in its compartment and got it out without my noticing.

Then again, I might have left it in the shop.

I shot back there and asked whether I’d left a bottle behind.

“No,” she said, “you took all three with you. I saw you pack them.”

She looked at me, concerned.

“Perhaps you took the other bottle out without really paying attention and you just don’t remember doing so?”

That must have been it, I thought. It was certainly true to character. I thanked her again – I didn’t want her to think I was accusing her of anything – and headed back home. But, no, I’d put away just two bottles, not three.

I went back to the dining table. There was a rucksack on it, completely empty. No third bottle.

And then I remembered that I’d put the rucksack I’d had with me on a chair by the dining table, not on the table itself. I took a look at that chair. And there, indeed, was a different rucksack. And, yes, it wasn’t empty.

I’ll leave you to complete the story from that point. All I’m going to add is that I was quite glad to discover that I was out of eggs, so I could go back to the shop and explain that really, truly, sincerely I had nothing to accuse her of. I did indeed have all three bottles. It was my absent-mindedness that had ever let me doubt it, nothing to do with her.

She seemed quite relieved.

As was I.

The immigrant in Spain: the joy of officialdom

In our continuing exploration of the exciting experience of being immigrants, we are discovering – or rather, rediscovering – the joys of dealing with public authorities. Because, you see, their procedures differ significantly from one country to another.

The ticket for your turn
Vital whatever you're after

For instance, when we moved to France, we knew we were going to be dealing with one of the most bureaucratised nations in Europe. The “village postmistress” is the iconic representative to the French of the worst kind of public service: she’s rude, dismissive and profoundly unhelpful. You know, the type who tells you that you needed Form 31B completed and signed by a doctor and then, when you return with Form 31B duly signed and completed, that it had to be the version in green not the version in buff.

So imagine my surprise when we moved to Strasbourg. I knew we had to register with the local authorities but didn’t know how soon. In the end, I went four months after we arrived. The interview went well, the young woman dealing with my case being polite, good-humoured and apparently efficient.

I know one should never offer anyone in authority any information for which they haven’t asked. For instance, like an experienced border crosser, I never show my passport unless told to produce it. But somehow on this occasion my conscience was bothering me, so I asked a question I never should have.

“Oh, by the way, just how long does one have to register? Is it three months or six?”

She looked up from the paperwork with an expression as cool as it was level.

“You have a week,” and paused dramatically. “But did I ask you when you got here?”

Later we moved just across the border into Germany. That’s the country of ‘Ordnung muß sein’, perhaps best translated as ‘order is to be respected’. So we were a bit worried about how the authorities would react when we decided we wanted a wood-burning stove.

“You need a chimney sweep to give your chimney a safety certificate and you can go ahead.” I had visions of complex inspections, failed on technicalities, and mountains of paperwork. But she went blithely on. “Here’s a list of local sweeps; personally, I was always find this one least demanding when it comes to the certificates.”

Now we’re in Spain. The land, we were told of ‘mañana’, where everyone prefers the easy life, where “laid-back” is a national pastime.

The first shock was to discover the punctuality of the people we’ve met. Not just for business meetings, either. We’ve found that friends are always on time simply to go out for a walk – and punctual not because they’re on time, but because they turn up ten minutes early to be sure they’re not late.

And then there are the authorities.

To be fair, despite a small number of exceptions, they’re uniformly friendly and kind. Even one who wasn’t to start with, ended up wreathed in smiles at the end of our interview. It was either that she’d had a lousy client just before us and it took a while for her to recover her equanimity, or that she was charmed by my delightful selection of Dad jokes – a little laboured in my halting Spanish but still up to the same remarkable standard as I achieve in English (OK, please resist the comment, it’s much too obvious).

The problem isn’t the people, it’s the process. I’ve already remarked that you can never do anything in a single visit in Spain. The first visit is so that you can be told that, although you followed the steps outlined on their website pretty well exactly, you failed to take one crucial step, or failed to bring one crucial document, or possibly failed to go to the right building in the first place, so that you have to plan for another visit. Or possibly more than one.

Most recently, it was the payment of a duty. We’d followed the online instructions carefully, including printing the document and taking it to the bank to make the necessary payment. But it turned out that, had we ticked another box (for, so the form claimed, a ‘supplementary’ payment, and we thought we only need the basic service), we’d have been charged a couple of euros more, and that was the sum we should have paid. Fortunately, they told us that this time we wouldn’t need a new appointment, but should just bring in the reprinted form with the bank’s certification that we’d paid the correct sum.

That was good news. Because this was a police office and if you showed up without an appointment, you had to take a ticket and wait your turn. But when your turn came around, all it enabled you to do was to make an appointment – and for two months down the line, the pressure on that service being so intense. To go through that again would have been soul-destroying.

As it happens, even with an appointment, we weren’t seen at the allotted time. Instead, just after the specified time, someone came out and gave us – a ticket. So we had to wait for our turn to come up on the display just like anyone who didn’t have an appointment.

You had an appointment? So what?
Wait your turn like anyone else.

So what was the point of having an appointment, you may well ask? Well, it meant that this time around, we actually had a proper interview. The one when they told us we’d paid the wrong level of duty.

But, hey, the man who told us did it politely and with a smile. Which makes all the difference, doesn’t it? A cold, unsmiling bureaucrat, of the kind we have in England, is so much harder to deal with.

So I can now confidently say that, of the countries I’ve had to deal with, Spain certainly has the most complex and time-consuming of administrative systems. But ironically, it’s quite pleasant.

Because the people are.

BoJo: a sight probably best left unseen

A statement generally attributed to the outstanding German Chancellor of the nineteenth century, Otto von Bismarck, declares that “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made”.

The same is true of democratic decisions. Or perhaps I should say semi-democratic, or even partially democratic, decisions, since I’m thinking of the ‘election’ of the UK’s new Prime Minister, Britain’s buffoon Boris Johnson, or BoJo as we like to think of him, without affection.

Would you buy a used car from this man?
(with apologies to the campaign against Richard Nixon)

He was elected leader of the Conservative Party, and therefore Prime Minister, by 92,153 members of his party. Rather fewer than 100,000 people, mostly male, mostly elderly, mostly white inhabitants of South-East England, chose the man to fill the most powerful post in a nation of 67 million. Over half of them women. Mostly far younger than the Tory Party average. Many of them non-white. The vast majority living outside South-East England.

There was a time when I shared the view that many of my fellow Labour Party members still hold, that a party’s leader should be elected by its members. I’ve begun seriously to doubt that idea.

Jeremy Corbyn was elected by 303,209 Labourites. Some of them were councillors, representing around 5500 people. Most of them were simply individuals, representing no one but themselves. Unknown, self-selected, not subject to any kind of public scrutiny, they chose the leader of the Labour Party.

Just as 90,000 odd Conservatives have just chosen our Prime Minister.

Each Member of Parliament represents around 70,000 voters, since it is the duty of MPs to represent all their constituents, whether they voted for or against them, or didn’t vote at all. We know our MPs. They’ve been through a public vetting process.

It’s beginning to feel to me as though we’d be serving democracy better if we let them take the decision on who should lead their party or the country.

Especially as we live in what we like to think of as a parliamentary democracy.

Still, I have to admit that my view may be coloured by the choices party members have made in recent years. There was a time when the British system could point to a couple of virtues alongside its many faults. One was that it tended to produce stable governments. The other was that it produced able leaders.

Well, stability is a fading memory. In this decade, only Theresa May held a parliamentary majority for her own party, until she threw it away in an unnecessary and disastrously-run election. Apart from 2015-2017, government has been a cobbled-together business since 2010, made of coalitions or inter-party agreements.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Plenty of countries are run all the time by coalitions. It’s just that Britain seems not to cope with them well, and the governments we’ve had over the last ten years have seemed to be always on the brink of tearing themselves apart.

So much for stability. What about the ability of the leaders? In the past, this came from people serving years in parliament, then for a while as hangers-on of government, then junior ministers, then in Cabinet. The process turned them from neophytes into experts, able to get the most from the system because they knew how it worked.

From time to time, there’d be people who shortcut this process. William Pitt the Younger, in the eighteenth century, Prime Minister at 24. Or Tony Blair, who became Prime Minister without previous ministerial experience, but then Labour had been out of office for 18 years and had precious few experienced people of the right kind of age to call on.

Pitt and Blair were exceptionally talented, think what you like of their policies. They rose to the challenge. But look who we have now.

In the red corner, we have Jeremy Corbyn. 32 years as a backbench MP, never having to deliver anything. A man who could limit himself purely to words, since no one with a sense of responsibility would let him anywhere near the authority to take action. He talked long and eloquently about a range of worthy causes which fascinated Islington dinner tables or Luton pub bars, but touched no one in the mass of the electorate. The results were predictable: unable to take a position on Brexit, he has put off voters from both camps; incapable of taking an intelligent position on antisemitism until just a few days ago, and then only under huge pressure, he has lost the trust of all but the shrinking band of his true believers.

In the blue corner, we have BoJo, who’s worse. Why, he has actually been through the experience mill. He was Mayor of London, with a tenure probably best summed up by his purchase, against expert advice, of second-hand water cannon from the Germans, no doubt with the intention of quelling resistance to his high-handed rule; they were never used and were finally sold for scrap at a massive loss, covered by taxpayers.

His most recent government experience, as Foreign Secretary, was even more deplorable. His ignorance of his briefs meant that officials were constantly having to correct his errors (“cleaning after him was quite a full-time activity,”, according to a Foreign Office colleague); he was rude to his hosts in a number of countries; he imperilled the life of a British subject imprisoned by the Iranians, and certainly extended her captivity, by his mishandling of negotiations with the Tehran regime.

In other words, he’s been tested. But far from making him any better, it just found him wanting. That, however, hasn’t stopped him being elected Prime Minister.

By 92,153 people.

Not an edifying sight. In fact, like the making of sausages, probably best left unseen.