Come with me now to Sausage Kingdom, where if it moos, croaks, cheeps, snorts, grunts, snuffles, hops or flies, the chances are it has been stuffed inside an all-natural casing and turned into one of the 50 different types of sausage available here.
Kangaroo, ostrich, buffalo, springbok or straightforward leek should satisfy those with an inexplicable urge to eat a national emblem, while culinary explorers could strike out for the wilder shores of chicken and blue cheese, duck and Calvados (contains marmalade and brandy) of beef peri peri, so hot, hot, they promise it will come back to haunt you. Or maybe not.
Do the sausages come with different accompaniments, I ask a blonde woman who sticks her head through a serving hatch. "What? On, no," she says. "They all come with mash, beans, fried onions and gravy."
Even, I ask, the traditional Boerewors, made from a recipe influenced by the Malays of the Cape of Good Hope and now, it says here, the standard South African barbecue sausage?
"Ooh, yes," says the nice lady. "Now, do you want a small or large portion? We can do you extra beans with that."
Ah. My heart swells with pride. Can there ever be any other country in the world quite like glorious England?
Sausage Kingdom happens every day at Kathy's Bistro, which is situated inside the Birdcage pub in the Oxfordshire village of Thame. All the locals said how pretty the village looked in the recent snow, but, today, as we rattle Thame-wards over the hills, it is almost obscured by mist and driving rain.
Apart from the Birdcage, the 13th-century main street, one of the widest in the country, also has an excellent Oxfam bookshop and the Spread Eagle Hotel, where the innkeeper John Fothergill lived and worked in the 1920s and where he also wrote his book, An Innkeeper's Diary. A towering snob, Fothergill chronicled how he would berate Oxford undergraduates for bringing shop girls to dinner, insist that couples who stayed there were married and spend hours chasing villagers out of his loos. Today, his old restaurant has a fillet steak with fondant potato on the menu at £18.95, which he would no doubt approve of, and a Sausage Kingdom across the road of which, perhaps, he would not.
The Birdcage is the handsomest building in town and, like Joan Collins, has parts that can be dated back to the 1200s. It drips with architectural delights such as huge elm corner-post timbers over sailing and dragon beams, with enough nooks for anyone to cranny in. The pub is also, apparently, haunted by a leper who was stoned to death by the locals. Nice.
In these kindlier times, it is the kind of red plush pub with brass bits and hunting prints that never gets written about much, but is a vital part of a community none the less. Inside, there are newspapers and hot soup, local business cards pinned above the fireplace, real ale and an air of peace. There are also pre-sliced lemons in plastic boxes on the bar, industrial-sized bottles of kitchen unguents and drying crockery visible through the food hatch. Somewhere in the distance, a microwave ping, ping, pings.
Middle-Aged British rather than Modern British, there seems no danger of the Birdcage being turned into the kind of Identikit gastropub where regulars or seniors are edged out by scrubbed pine, polenta and high prices. For which small mercy, many thanks.
In Kathy's Bistro, there really is a Kathy, who sources her sausages from O'Hagan's Sausage Shop in Bosham, West Sussex, and is very proud of the fact that they are made with 100 per cent natural ingredients and are artificial flavour free. First, we have a steak au poivre sausage and a wild boar sausage, both of which come with properly made, properly plain mashed potato, a hill of baked beans, onions and gravy. The same gravy. Interesting. You make your selection and order from the little hatch, adorned with chalk drawings of prawns and pepper mills for no good reason that anyone can think of.
The sausages, like Olympic teams parading around a stadium, have little flags flying to proclaim their identity and are both of high quality and densely packed with meats. The steak one is good and beefy, with a real blast of black pepper, and the wild boar, although it is made from farmed animals, has a gamey, authentic flavour. As for the baked beans and onions, well, they are just yummy and, I have to say, an occasional but welcome respite from the salisify/yam/squash/toasted fennel with kumquats/bouting sproccoli beat. Sometimes, you know, you just want some beans. Portions come in small (4oz/110g) or normal (8oz/225g) and cost £5.95 and £6.95 respectively, which seems a fair price for a nice, simple meal.
We also sampled the pheasant and whisky (excellent!), chicken with garlic and the hot Italian, which all delivered what their little flags promised and were each distinctly and strongly flavoured, despite the generic gravy - a very English touch. However, they were, like all the best sofas, extremely generously stuffed.
There might still be those, myself included, who have to be persuaded of the innate merits of a chicken sausage, but there can be no doubt of their friendly, midweek appeal, however humble or exotic the variety might be. Kathy slowly bakes the sausages in the oven when they are delivered - no pricking, she insists - fast chills them and then pings or fries them to order. With such a large menu, there is no other way to do it, but the sausages genuinely don't seem to suffer.
'Why are you writing about this? It's only a serving hatch," says Kathy, but there is never nothing "only" about something simple done well.
Her own personal favourites are the wild venison and the Creole, although the bestseller is one of the South African barbecue ones. There is even a County Collection, which I thought only happened with wellingtons and waxed macs, but among which I can recommend the herby Oxfordshire and only mourn that they had run out of the pork and appley Somerset.
Bombardier and Brakspear are among a selection of beers available in the pub, as are a range of New World wines available by the glass.
