Blog challenge

As I haven’t posted for so long, I’m doing a blog challenge organised by my friend L to get me back in the habit of posting. There are prompts and everything.

Today’s prompt: Write about a discontinued product that you wish you could still buy.

I can’t think of any product I like that has been discontinued (does this mean I’m young? I think so, but my children disagree!) so I’m going to write about something I love but can’t get over here.

Sausages.

Yep, I said sausages. But you’re in Switzerland, you say, do they not eat sausages there? Could it be that they only like cow-based products, you wonder to yourself. Certainly “Heidi” doesn’t really feature pigs.

Let me reassure you that they do have pigs here. And they have many many varieties of something they call sausage (well, saucisse, or Wurst, or whatever the Italian for sausage is). They even have beef sausages. What they don’t have is British or Irish sausages. And by that, I mean Walls or Richmonds, the best sausages in the world.

Swiss sausages (and German ones, which are also widely available here), are made of meat, and spices. They can best be described as meaty and, sometimes, as extremely salty. British/Irish sausages on the other hand are made of small amounts of pig meat, and large amounts of spices and bread. They are not meaty, nor inordinately salty. They are delicious, and they are not sold here at all. Not even by the shops who specially import British stuff such as Marmite, Cheddar, or Cadburys. (You may not have thought those things were British, but believe me, they are. Root beer, however, is American.)

So whenever we go back to the UK we make sure my mother-in-law has an ample supply of sausages. And we eat sausages in restaurants, given the option. On occasion we have been known to import a packet of frozen ones with us, in our luggage. (Until we discovered that was illegal. Oops.)

But otherwise we must do without. It is the price we pay for living in this beautiful, frustrating country. And now I hear the sounds of dinner being prepared which creates a suitable if somewhat abrupt end to my post.

Postscript: It turns out we’re having sausages. The Swiss kind.

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