Fit as a butcher’s dog

Not that I saw a dog in the butchers today. That would be against every health and safety rule in the land. Every HSE rule except the one which should be created for the characters on the adverts late at night on TalkSport Radio, who fall off their ladders regularly instantly earning them a free holiday to Majorca as compensation.

No, what I saw was an absolutely bewildering array of stuff. Like the guy sent out shopping for ‘ladies things’ by his girlfriend, I get this amazing need when I walk into a butchers to pick something and get out as quickly as possible. Seriously, it’s like shopping in the butcher’s is my own personal SAS mission into a volatile situation. It’s sad really. My grandad was a butcher for a time, a curious job move from looking after horses on a farm but there you go, and I feel I should be more knowledgeable about these things.

You see the sad reality is that I’ve grown up choosing my meat from a display chiller in a supermarket, with all the cuts labelled and in bad-for-the-environment but good-for-disguising-the-fact-it was-an-animal cellophane packaging. I can browse, discover things for myself without looking silly, and then pay for it at the till manned by someone who can barely tell the difference between an apple and a kiwi, let alone critique by choice of lamb-shank. The butcher’s is full of little old ladies, or more accurately old men, who know exactly what cut of what kind of meat treated in what kind of way they want. I’m not like that. I can see the blackboard on the wall that talks about all kind of mystical stuff – special cuts with faniciful names, stuff in weights I don’t understand (damn those teachers who stubbornly chose to talk in imperial measurements at school!), but it may as well be written in Sanskrit for all the good it does me.

I’m sure there are untold wonders waiting for me to receive them, but I’m snowblind. I’m left staring blankly at the comparatively boring chiller display in front of me, choosing sausages in cellophane finding the exact change in order to aid a swift exit to the meatless safety of the High Street. Surely there must be somewhere I can find out about this stuff?

Actually, surely in this day and age we, the consumer, should probably expect a butcher to have a website to lead us through the botanical garden that is butchers-cut meats (such is the sad way of the world where we Google things rather than actually asking another human being). My local bakery has done it. You can see their site here. You can even mail-order bread, and receive it via ParcelForce the day after it was baked. It’s really good 100% organic bread. I recommend it.