In his novel Coming up for Air (1939), George Orwell has his benighted protagonist, George Bowling, bite into a sausage, only to discover that it tastes of something else altogether: ‘…pop! The thing burst in my mouth like a rotten pear. A sort of horrible soft stuff was oozing all over my tongue. But the taste! For a moment I just couldn’t believe it. Then I rolled my tongue round it again and had another try. It was fish!’ 

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I thought of George Bowling as my disgruntled family sat outside Felbrigg Hall in North Norfolk last week, eyeing me balefully — and I envied him. At least his sausage tasted of something. For I had just spent £43.40 on five sausage rolls and five cans of (soft) drink from a converted horsebox. I expected, for that extraordinary price, some sort of artisanal snack made from the sort of pampered pigs who produce the porcine equivalent of Wagyu beef.  

Our hopes weren’t high when five flaky factory-farmed slices that Greggs would have been embarrassed to sell were delivered to our table. My husband – a connoisseur of all things pig – took one for the team and bit into his first. He gagged. But it was a cold day, and we were all hungry after a walk and a morning’s lambing at the farm on the estate, so bravely followed him.  

Like George Bowling’s sausage, ‘a sort of........

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