It was snowing, not heavily it was true, but it was a couple of degrees below freezing with a stiff wind, so the snow was sticking and blowing up against the front of the Green Dragon. Gladys had already opened up, and apart from the story tellers’ wives she expected few customers in the lounge for an hour or so. The old reprobates that inhabited the taproom were sure to be entering it via the side door in the next ten minutes or so after having escorted their womenfolk to the shelter of the porch outside the double doors at the front that led into the lounge, so she had glasses ready and a selection of bottles of suitably corrosive spirits on the bar for the men to take the chill off before they settled down to their usual pints. The bottles of spirits, that actually belonged to the old men, came from all over the world and most had paid no duty, nor would they be considered safe enough by the health authorities to be legally saleable. Sasha always said, “You only die once so you may as well enjoy it.”

For the ladies she had a large bowl of heated fruit punch freshened up with a couple of bottles of Lidl’s(1) cheap brandy. They’d had a tasting session months ago, and all had decided spending any more on brandy that was going to be poured into freshly squeezed orange juice flavoured with spices was foolishness.

Pete had filled the bunkers at the sides of the fires with logs earlier in the day and stacked the already lit open fires high to warm the room, the lounge was heated by central heating radiators. He was outside with a shovel and a barrow of gritty road salt, courtesy of the highways department though they were not aware of that, making sure that drinkers would not have their access to the bar interrupted by a trip to the hospital due to a broken neck of femur caused by a fall. Harry was a waggon [eighteen wheeler] driver and had recently been carrying road salt for delivery to various local authorities in the north. He’d dropped a couple of tons off at the Green Dragon and a dozen local men had built a bunker for it and shovelled it in out of the rain, so Pete had more than enough to see even the fiercest of winters through.

“Christ, that’s cold enough to freeze the bollocks off a brass monkey.” Gladys couldn’t see the speaker, but with that accent it could only be Sasha.

She ignored the language, but said, “I thought you Siberians were supposed to be the hardest men in the world when it came to cold, Sasha.”

“I’ve never been this old before, Love. I was ok years ago. Even wearing my furs I feel it these days.” Before removing his coat, Sasha reached for a bottle and started to pour a measure, but as he heard voices coming in he started filling several more.

“You want to be careful, Sasha. If the local conservationists find out those furs are real, they nail you a barn door.”

“Aye. Bloody squirrel picklers.(2) They need to find something better to spend their time on. What’s for supper tonight, Gladys.”

“I listened to the weather forecast this morning and it said after lunch the temperature was going to plummet below freezing for a fortnight and snow was coming, so I thought something warming and substantial would be appropriate. Aggie’s made steak and kidney pudding with green peas and kidney and onion gravy and she’s done some mashed potato too.”

“Bless the lass. If we weren’t both married I’d run off with her just for her cooking. One of those for me, Sasha?” Sasha handed Stan a glass and started handing the others a glass too. “What is it? Tastes a bit like Pernod only with twice the kick.”

“Not far off, Stan. It’s Raki, comes from Turkey. It’s like Greek ouzo, but a fair bit stronger. The turks usually add water or ice, but given the cold I thought it’d be ok as it is. Pour Pete a double he’ll need it messing about outside with that salt and a shovel. There's some absinthe, the green stuff, to try too if you’ve a mind. It’s only marginally toxic.”

The men were all laughing at that and started to remove, hats, gloves and overcoats.

Ten minutes later the men had all arrived and Gladys was providing the ladies with a second hot punch in the lounge. Coats, hats and gloves were hanging up over the radiator, and Pete was behind the bar pulling pints. When all were settled, Sasha started.

“It were as if it were meant to happen. You know Elle’s parents didn’t get on with me to start with. Well I’m going back to when things had got better. Her mum had realised pretty quickly that I was a decent bloke and she started to call round at the house from early on. Obviously she knew I was a different and a foreigner, and she knew I did a lot of our cooking. I only know how to cook stuff from home, and she knew it was just different not poison. She liked most of it even though I never told her what went into some of it.”

“How do you mean, Sasha?”

“I always collected wild vegetables to eat. Milk thistle and the like. They used to be eaten in this country too before folk got wealthy and started calling them weeds. Back home a lot of folk can only dream about being what folk over here call poor. I’ve always collected road kill. It’s just cheap meat and Vince the Mince(3) saves all sorts for me. Stuff other folk won’t eat or stuff he has to spend time on to sell, Breast of lamb, trotters, heads, shin beef and oxtail before some idiot celebrity chef told every one they were good to eat and the price went through the damned roof. Sweetbreads and other offal, he’d just sell to me cheap rather than having to do anything with them. I never told Elle’s mum she was eating sheep head pie just said it was mutton, that sort of thing.

“Elle’s dad came round eventually. I’ll maybe tell you about that some time, but this was not long after that. I’ve no idea where we were going or why, but we were quite a ways from home in the car. Bugger me, in the far distance I espied a pheasant come gliding over the hedge on my left and drop down dead into a lay by. I never heard the shot, but what’s a man to do? I pulled into the lay by, picked up my free meat that had clearly been ordained by a higher authority to be meant for me, threw it in the boot [US trunk] and continued on my way. The in laws were stunned. Elle was laughing fit to burst. Her dad asked, ‘What was that all about?’

“ ‘Dinner,’ I said. ‘A good sized this year’s cock pheasant. The season only opened, day before yesterday. Worth at least a tenner, and being this season’s it’ll be tender.’ I carried on driving listening to Elle explain I did that sort of thing all the time. Tell you they came round after the first mouthful that evening. Not their fault they were townsfolk.”

“Nother time Elle’s younger sister and her old man with their kids were staying with us and we were going out for a meal. She wanted to take something with her and asked if she could put it in the boot. I gave her the keys and thought nothing of it till I heard her scream. That’s when I realised I’d forgotten to take a completely flattened hare out of the boot. There was nothing on it we could eat, but it was protein for my pigs. I went out and telt her to stop screaming it was just a dead hare. I picked it up and threw it over the fence to the pigs. Thirty seconds later it was gone. My brother in law said he wished he’d the balls to do that to his missus. Takes all sorts you know.

“I think I can follow that, Sasha.”

“Go on then, Pat,” said Stan “I’ll get em in.”

“It was when I was courting, Siobhan. We’d been to the travelling fair on Belmont Road. Had a good time. I won a teddy bear for Siobhan on one of the stalls which pleased her more than anything I’d ever managed to do before. I’ve always said there’s no understanding any of them. After the fair closed down for the night we, like a lot of others, decided a drink or two in the Oakleaf, which was only a hundred yards from the fair ground, would be a good way to finish the night off. The room was packed, so I said, ‘The hell with it, Siobhan, it’s the tap or home. There was a damn good crowd in the tap. A good few of the wild boys from the estates were there with their running dogs, you know, lurchers. One of them had a hare, dead as a nail, but he was cracking on to some girls it was alive and a pet. Working it he made it look like it was drinking from his glass. Kept it going for maybe ten minutes or so before the girls started screaming. The only thing louder than the screams from the girls was the laughter from the lads.

“ ‘A couple of quid for puss?’(4) I asked.

“ ‘Done,’ ” he said and the hare was mine.

“Not longer after that someone produced a fiddil(5) and another two a pair of bodhráin(6) and the music started. The music and songs were all stuff I’d known all my life, so I joined in by singing and it was two before we left a still very much alive event.

“We had the hare for Sunday lunch.”

At that point Gladys announced supper. There were few strangers in the taproom, but all ordered supper and one said, “Hell, that hit the spot. I travelled forty-odd miles to get here, and the tales alone are worth it, but the supper is the icing on the cake. Is it still snowing?”

Gladys replied, "Aye heavier and according to the forecast likes as not it'll get worse."

"Have you a room for the night?"

"Aye, Lad," replied Pete, "But you may be wanting it for a few days."

"If that's the case, so be it."

The other outsiders looked at each other and ordered rooms too. One looking like a guilty schoolboy said, "I can hardly get shouted at for that. I'm sure she'd rather I returned late than not at all, and I did ask her if she wanted to come with me." Sasha gave the other old men a sly look and shrugged his shoulders.

After the obligatory visits to the gents and the ordering of more beer, faces looked round to see if any one was going to continue the tales, or if it was an early start to their games of dominoes.

Geoff coughed and said, “Seeing as we’re on about game and roadkill I’ve a tale to relate. I was driving to work down the coast road, but I had an interview for promotion, and I was up against two others. Now, I’ve only ever worn a suit once. I’ve never felt so ill at ease, and I didn’t get the job. Other than that I’ve always worn the kilts and I’ve always got the job, so I was dressed up to the nines in full regalia and feeling pretty confident. I was on that stretch of wide road with the woodland on your right as your going south when I saw it. A red deer stag. I had that green Izusu crew cab pick up in those days, the French import. There weren’t any crew cabs sold direct into the UK for a few years.

“Kilts or no bloody kilts that stag, half on the road and half on the verge, was a serious amount of meat. I drove past and and turned round half a mile farther on in the side road. I pulled past it half on the verge, reversed up, put the hazard lights on and took off my sporran and waistcoat. I took my knife out of the centre console. You never know it might have appreciated the mercy, but it was dead as a nail, so I put the knife back. It was a big bugger, possibly four hundred weight, [450 pounds 200 kg], as big as they come. I dropped the tailgate getting looks from every vehicle that passed, wearing the kilts didn’t help. There was no way I was getting a fortune’s worth of clothing messed up, so I’d a problem. I’m big and was damned strong in those days, but it was heavy and had four broken legs. I suspected the legs were broken by some idiot driving over them after it had been killed.

“I reckoned the only way was to swing it up. So I rolled my shirt sleeves up as far as they would go and grabbed it by a foreleg and a hind leg above the breaks. I swung it back and forth getting more momentum each time till I had it well off the ground when I just kept going round. Finally I flung it up on to the tailgate. It only just made it, but I rolled it over, pushed it back and shut the tailgate. I’d got blood on my hands and arms, but other than that I was fine. I always carry a twenty five litre camping container of water, so after washing my hands and arms I was feeling pretty pleased with my self, despite the looks from the slowing traffic. I had to go a mile down the road to turn round, but I made it to work on time. I had my interview at eleven, I was on form and fancied my chances, but they said I wouldn’t be told till just before I left work at five whether I’d got the job or not.

“At half two I got a phone call from personnel. The personnel offices looked out over the car park, but I thought they were ringing me to tell me I hadn’t got the job. ‘Mr. McAlpine, there appears to be a deer in the back of your pick up.’ Well I ask you what are you supposed to say to that? It’s a statement, not a question.

“Aye,” I said waiting for further response.

“Oh. That’s fine then,” the voice said and then the line went dead. I was told I’d got the job at quarter to five and I may as well leave early, so facing a big butchering job I went home. All in all it had been a bloody good day. When I got home, I went to change and told Karen to get the freezer bags and labelling kit out. There was nowhere I had big enough to butcher the beastie, so I decided to do it on the tailgate. I fetched a couple of clean buckets for the offal and all my butchering gear and gralloched the beastie just fine. I sorted the offal out and Karen took it away to wash and for me to process in the kitchen. I was about to skin the carcass when I realised I’d left my skinning knife in the kitchen. I went for it and when I came back the bloody carcass was moving.

“You mind that wee red tom cat of mine, well the wee bugger was scarce more than a kitten then and had jumped up and was inside the beastie. As I got nearer he stuck his head out. He was covered in blood and I swear downright the look on his face was saying, ‘Now this is what I call a moose.’ That’s a mouse to you, Alf. I tried to catch the cat but he was nae up for being catcht, nor for being chased away, so I had to put up with him. I skinned it and butchered it giving the wee bugger a mouthful every so often to keep him away from my knife till he couldn’t move. It was a hell of a piece of meat. Must have been a twelve month before we finished the last piece.”

“Gladys, another round please, Love. Now is it dominoes or has anybody else got a tale? Go on then Harry.”

“I’ve got a brief one, Stan. Not very interesting, but true enough. I used to drive down Kingside Hill on the road from Abbeytown to Silloth and back six days a week for a few years delivering bread. There must be at least one badger sett near there because there was a dead one on the road regularly, usually towards the bottom end of the hill. One evening, I was looking up German sausages on the internet when I came across Central European badger hams. Well I looked into it, and it seems they were pretty common food along with rooks, magpies, foxes and rats too for poor folk not that long ago in Britain. You have to make sure they’re cooked properly because they can carry parasites and TB but treat them like pork, especially wild boar, and they were supposed to taste ok. So the next one I came across I took home and gave it a try.”

“You being serious, Harry, or just working us? Badger, come on.”

“Do I sound like I’m joking, Frank? I salted the hams and made sausage with the rest. It was tastier than some ham and sausages I’ve been sold that were anything but cheap. That celebrity chef Clarissa Dickson Wright was saying in the Telegraph not long since that we should eat the badgers that the government has sanctioned culling in the drive against the spread of TB. I told you it was only a short one.”

“What’s it taste like, Harry?”

“If you weren’t told any different, a salted ham would be just another salted ham. They taste like pork ham. I stripped all the meat off the rest and chopped it fine rather than mincing it, like sausage used to be done years ago. That’s what the Polish recipe I found on the internet said to do. I followed the recipe and added chopped ramsons and chopped wilted young green nettles, and ground up toasted fennel, coriander and a bit of nutmeg, and a hell of a lot of salt. I thought they’d be too salty but it anything they could’ve stood a bit more. I like watching that award winning Scott Rea, the butcher from Worcester that does the Scottreaproject on youtube. His masterclass on sausage making is the business, so when in doubt I go with what he does. He says the secret is keeping everything ice cold when you make sausage, so the fat doesn’t render, and it works. Most folks’ videos are pretty poor. Especially if you can’t understand their language or their English isn’t too hot, so with Scott Rea’s video on venison sausage and the Polish one on badger sausage I did ok.”

Eric asked, “Would you do it again, Harry?”

“Damned right I will, but next time I’m going to use a bit more salt, a load of ground black pepper, more nutmeg and some cinnamon too. I’m going to put a bit aside to flavour with chile pepper and star anise. They were the best sausage I’ve tasted in a long time, but I don’t think that’s because they were badger. I think it’s because they were made like all sausages should be, but aren’t. Only sausage I’ve had in years that got close was Waberthwaite Cumberland sausage, but they’re made right and ain’t cheap. Quality costs, either you pay in money or you do it yourself and pay in time. That was what started me making sausage in the first place, now I do all sorts, but all take time, and some take money too. I’m waiting for a hare to try that, though I’m telt it’s like venison sausage. I want to try a French beef sausage recipe that contains dried fruit, raisins or sultanas. Partner you, Paul?”

“Aye. Set em up lads.” As the domino battles commenced in earnest, Pete restacked the fires with logs and the wind began to howl. Gladys was keeping an eye on the weather and listening to the local radio reports. Even if it became impossible for folk to get home it wouldn’t be the first time the clientele had had to spend the night, and there was enough food and fuel on the premises to last a twelve month. However, Pete was managing the taproom and she was missing out on gossip with the ladies. Whatever happened all would be well, those gentlemen intent on domino battle and telling even more even taller stories were a capable bunch, despite their ages.

1 Lidl, a German supermarket chain.
2 Squirrel pickler, pejorative term for conservationists and their like. It comes from the concept of preserving squirrels by pickling them.
3 Vince the Mince, the local butcher. Minced meat or mince is the UK term for ground meat.
4 Puss, a term used for a hare that goes back centuries if not millennia in parts of Britain.
5 Fiddil, violin.
6 Bodhráin, plural of bodhrán, an Irish frame drum played with a cipín or tipper.