There are a lot of things to mourn as print media is consolidated and regional mastheads shut down in favour of very slightly bigger metropolitan newsrooms, not the least of which is local colour pieces. People who find a rude-looking vegetable at the supermarket and neighbourhood poopers and all the other things that come with having a smaller paper that is in very close contact with its readers.
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Take, for example, this absolutely flawless story from the Swindon Advertiser, which serves the town of Swindon in England:
There are a few interesting things to note here, and we’ll do the most important one last. Firstly: the Daily Mail-style use of putting one word in ALL CAPS for emphasis, and choosing to do so with the word ‘face’, really is something. Second: including the price of the packet of sausages. Third: calling the sausages ‘bangers’. So far, so good. Obviously, though, the most interesting thing here is this delightful three-word phrase: “sausage meat face“.
What exactly is a “sausage meat face“? Why, I’m so glad you asked:
Source: The Swindon Advertiser.
It is a smiley face, formed from smushed together sausages. As Fran Webster told the Advertiser, instead of the 20 sausages she was promised, she received only 12 sausages, and that misshapen sausage lump.
Here is how the Advertiser described what took place:
A MUM-of-two got a shock when she found herself face-to-face with a grinning, inch-thick disk of sausage meat.
Fran Webster found the beaming banger bonce in a packet of 91p sausages bought from Aldi on Shaw Road last week.
It’s not every day you read a news story containing the phrases “face-to-face with a grinning, inch-thick disk of sausage meat” and “beaming banger bonce” but, dear god, I so badly wish it was.
Webster was apparently not entirely concerned about what she found — but still a little bit: “I’d like to give the person who did it a high five. It’s amazing. But it does make you worry about eating the sausages that were in the packet.”
The article in full, which I strongly urge you to read immediately, is the gift that keeps on giving, offering up other tales of Swindon residents making weird food discoveries, including a child who “almost swallowed a thumb-sized piece of what she feared was flesh left in her strawberry smoothie“.
Incredible.
