Harry and Meghan 'snubbed' by Balmoral...

Also, an absolute sausage fest, a podcast recommendation, and the TERRIBLE new Gladiator trailer

Jul 16, 2024

Much fuss, as usual at this time of year, over the fact that Harry and Meghan have been ‘snubbed’ and aren’t going to Balmoral with the fam this summer. ‘Is Queen Camilla to blame for Harry and Meghan’s Balmoral snub?’ screamed a headline I spied over the weekend. I suspect Camilla might have more pressing matters on her hands, myself. Her husband’s health, for example. But who are we to say?

It happens every summer now, this Meghan-and-Harry-aren’t-invited-to-Balmoral lark. Meghan did go once, in 2018, not long after she and Harry were married, but never since.

And can we really blame her?

Look, Scotland in the summer can be lovely. Ravishingly beautiful in parts. Wild. Remote. Heather-y. Magnificent. But this will be for roughly half an hour one afternoon in August when the sun boldly appears through the clouds. Otherwise, well, you know all that rain we’ve been having elsewhere recently? That, as the kids say.

Posh people are obsessed with going to Scotland at this time of year, largely to kill things (deer; fish) while dressed in the favourite form of clothing (tweed), but it simply isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. Here’s why:

The midges aren’t great and the ticks are worse. I found one in my belly button once after sitting in a mound of heather in the Hebrides, and I had to pick it out with my fingernails. You don’t get that sort of thing in Provence or Mykonos, do you?
It takes nine days to get there and you begin to wonder, on the last stretch of the drive, as you bump down a farm track in the dark, when you’ve needed a wee for the past four hours, whether a flight from Luton to somewhere hot would have been quite so bad after all.
As mentioned, you will be outside from shortly after breakfast until at least tea time, no matter the weather, either trying to find a deer or a fish. Or a grouse after August 12 (‘the Glorious Twelfth', it’s dubbed), when you’re allowed to shoot them. It’s only a bit of rain! You can’t get chilblains in August! Here, have this tweed hat!
You may have to swim in a loch.
The first time you run a bath in a posh Scottish house, you may be startled by the colour of the water. It’s rusty brown. Are you about to get tetanus? Don’t worry, it’s just been discoloured by the peat. A few years ago, Kirstie Allsopp posted a picture of her bath water from a house on Jura, another of the Hebridean islands, and her followers were horrified. ‘Looks like one of the kids pood [sic] in the bath hun,’ one wrote underneath. You may also only be allowed two inches of tepid brown water because everyone else in the house also needs a bath to turn their hands and feet the right colour again after that swim in the loch.

Kirstie’s bath. It’s not the Four Seasons, is it?

Years ago, a mole told me that Balmoral was all ‘old-fashioned quilts and electric fires.’ They were making out, in other words, that it was ever so slightly Victorian and uncomfortable. Things may have changed in recent years but it is still fairly common in a good number of Scottish houses to find lumpy beds covered with old blankets rather than Egyptian cotton. Character building stuff!
You may have to wear black tie for dinner every evening.
You may also have to spend an evening doing complicated Scottish reels which everyone else seems to know the moves to while you bumble around like Mr Collins at the Netherfield ball.
You will spend the other evenings playing games. August in Scotland, for posh people, is a bit like Christmas in this respect. Endless charades, probably some Racing Demon, quite possibly a few rounds of Sardines. The cereal box game remains an old favourite too. You know the one: someone puts an empty box of Rice Crispies on the carpet and everyone has to take turns to bend over and pick it up with their mouth, and each round the box is whittled down with scissors until it’s just a flat piece of cardboard on the ground, which some tiresomely bendy show-off can still get down and pick up with her lips. ‘It’s all in the hips,’ says a lascivious house guest who’s had too many whiskies, watching from across the room. I don’t know if they do this one in Balmoral but they probably play all the others. In The Crown, they play Ibble Dibble. I’d forgotten how *perfectly* excruciating the scene below is…

So each to their own and all that, but it’s not absolutely everyone’s idea of a holiday and being ‘snubbed’ by a lack of invitation may not actually be the worst thing. I’m off there myself in a few weeks, albeit camping in a site just outside Edinburgh with my mother, my sister and two dogs (because we left it quite late and couldn’t find a hotel that wasn’t a million pounds), in order to see my little brother’s stand-up show at the Fringe. It’s going to rain almost solidly, I know it is, but at least we won’t have to wear black tie.

Picture of the week

I spotted this magnificent letter in the Telegraph on Saturday, and posted it on Instagram. Poor Alan, I wrote, can anyone help out? Quite a few people wanted to chat about Margaret’s letter beside Alan’s, but we haven’t got time to discuss that now. I suspect Margaret’s husband knew what he was doing.

A few wags on Instagram also gleefully pointed out that Alan had written a letter about sausages from a place called STIFFKEY. Chortle chortle. I didn’t like to point out that Stiffkey is one of those silly Britishisms and it’s actually pronounced ‘Stookey’. Also, I find it quite hard to believe that Alan is struggling to find decent sausage in Norfolk. I lived there for a few months some years ago while writing my third book and discovered I could hardly move for posh sausage (enough sausage innuendos?). The fishmonger in Burnham Market is an Old Etonian, for Heaven’s sake. It is an area I found to be stuffed with top-notch delis and produce, but poor Alan suggests otherwise.

Helpfully, however, SO many people replied to my Instagram post with sausage suggestions - both in Norfolk and across the country - that I thought I’d give you all a list of them here in case you want a decent banger for the barbie any time soon. Also, if anyone knows Alan Collins from Stiffkey, could you possibly pass them on?

Musk’s, says my pal Pip. These are Royal warranted sausages from Newmarket. Dead posh. You can get them from Waitrose.
The Ginger Pig, says brilliant food writer and cookbook author Rebecca Seal, who knows her stuff. They accept online orders, although a packet of six is £11 so mind how you go.
HG Walter, the top Baron’s Court butchers, says the Reverend Hubert (google him). They also accept online orders. My uncle Giles is also a fan of these guys and cooked a beef rib from them a few months ago which would have put Henry VIII to shame, if that swings it for you.
Cranston’s Butcher in Penrith, Cumbria, says my friend Wally, who’s also quite a sausage expert.
Cashells Butchers in Crickhowell, says the lovely Tiggy L-B, former Royal nanny, who probably therefore also knows her sausages. A handy one if you happen to be in South Wales any time soon.
John Murray butcher in Loxwood, says a Sussex friend. ‘Locally reared meat from the Sussex/Surrey border,’ says their website, which probably means they’re on the Surrey side as that’s what people in Surrey often say. ‘We’re more the Surrey/Sussex border, really.’ But we won’t hold that against them.
Sumblers in Marlborough - various intriguing-sounding sausages from these guys including The Ramsbury Sausage, made with local beer, The Burbage Sausage (made with shitake mushrooms) and wild boar sausages.
Cockburns butchers in North Yorkshire - a ‘craft’ butchers, no less. You can order boxes from these chaps. A Banger and Burger box, for instance, which comes with 12 burgers (inc steak burgers and chorizo burgers), and at least 18 sausages for £40. Not bad I reckon.
Jago’s on Chelsea Green. This butcher is near the lovely if fairly eye-watering fishmonger where I went recently, asked for two seabass fillets and then was too embarrassed to say I’d changed my mind when the till was rung up and the fishmonger said they’d be close to £40. Probably around £40 a sausage too.
Multiple recommendations for Norfolk, where unhappy Alan lives, so for brevity’s sake I’m going to list them in the same point: Harvey’s in Norwich, P&S Butchers in Holt (recommended by the writer Susan Hill, no less), and Howells in Wells.
John Robinson’s in Stockbridge, Hampshire. ‘High-class’ they say, which is a phrase I would normally shiver at, but I’ll allow it when it comes to sausages.
John Davidson’s in Elgin. (Why are so many butchers called John?) Blimey, they list 36 different types of sausage products on their website. You can pick up some black or indeed white pudding while you’re there. Also, haggis. This is Scotland, after all.
Owen Barratt. He’s based at the Rye Bakery in trendy Frome (Somerset), and is ‘the king when it comes to tasty sausages’, says one fan. You know how people have recently gone mad for artisan sandwiches from trendy bakeries? Owen seems to make not artisan sandwiches but artisan hot dogs. Don’t panic. Not hot dogs with nasty rubbery frankfurters. Hot dogs with delicious, proper sausages. He has an Instagram account where he shows off his sausage wares, inc a hot dog with Pom Bears pictured below.
The Farm At Tavebury in Wiltshire - a very good farm shop, apparently. Don’t be put off by the cute pictures of piglets on their website. The circle of life and all that.
Revetts of Wickham Market in Suffolk. If Alan struggles in Norfolk, he could always pop across the border to this place. They seem to be very serious indeed about sausages, boasting on their website that they’re ‘the winners of many best sausage competitions.’ They have a ‘secret sausage recipe’ developed over 50 years, apparently, using a very precise balance of pork meat and fat to create just the right juiciness. I’m quite tempted to make the trip from SE19, tbh.
Owen’s trendy hot dog, with sauce gribiche, chives and Pom Bears

Recommendation of the week

Anyone reading this in America, and a good number of Brits, may laugh at this suggestion for being so obvious. It’s a podcast which is already HUGE over there and listened to pretty widely by political nerds here. It’s called Pod Save America and I listen to it whenever anything major’s happening in the States. Generally when there’s an election on. Its four hosts are all pals who used to work for Obama when he was president, so it’s very informed and very Democrat. They also like a bit of political - forgive me for using this word - banter, which may or may not be your thing. You have to be pretty interested in the ins and outs of American politics to enjoy it, and whenever they start wanging on about a certain senator or piece of legislation I often lose the thread. But I’ve started listening again in recent weeks with the Biden debate raging because I feel like I want more intel than any of the British podcasts provide about American politics.

Does that sound very wanky? I feel like it might.

Basically, it’s a great left-leaning podcast, which will keep you up-to-date as the nightmare staggers on until November and beyond. The Rest Is Politics have recently launched their own American version but I don’t love the hosts, and the BBC have Americast. But if you want more on the US at this slightly dicey time, give it a shot. Whoops. Possibly not a shot given the weekend’s events. Give it a go.

Nonsense of the week

The Gladiator II trailer, which was released last week. Have you seen it? If not I’ll stick it below:

There are obviously immensely high hopes for this film, 24 years on from the original. ‘My name is Maximus blah blah blah…’ TWENTY FOUR YEARS. Isn’t that mad? The first one came out in 2000. Just looking that up has made me feel nine hundred years old.

Anyway, pics of Paul Mescal on set - beefed up and in various bits of leather - have been leaking for months and everyone’s worked them up into a right frothy state about the film, a sequel to the original, which picks up with Lucius (remember him? The young son of the woman Russell Crowe had the hots for? The nephew of evil Joaquin Phoenix?), who seems to be training to become a gladiator himself.

At least, I think he’s training as a gladiator. It’s quite hard to tell with that big old mess of a trailer. Battles scenes, baddies, more battle scenes, a terrible CGI rhino, fairly silly lines that don’t absolutely work (‘Rome has so many subjects, she must feed them,’ growls Pedro Pascal, who plays a general. ‘They can eat WAR!’ comes Caesar’s reply. Eh?)

I think it looks deeply confusing at best, not that it’ll stop any of us going to see it. It’s being released in November, on the same day that the screen version of Wicked is coming out (starring Ariana Grande), which has already led some to say this is the equivalent of last year’s Barbenheimer clash, between Barbie and Oppenheimer. Christ, ok, so now we’re facing…Wickiator? It sounds like a piece of gym equipment designed by Joe Wicks.

Aaaaand I think that’s probably enough silliness for another week.