I can't decide whether this is better than the Beer and Pie Festival or not that I wrote about almost a year ago. Is it because it is February? Is it because there are those (we go nameless) who consider beer an appropriate vegetable course when in the presence of beer or sausage or BBQ or any other, be honest, meat. It could be all of those things that make this article in the Oxford Mail so compelling:

A sausage and beer festival using local produce will be held at an Oxfordshire pub this weekend. The Cricketer’s Arms, in Littleworth, near Wheatley, is holding its first food and drink extravaganza at the suggestion of its regulars. From tomorrow until Sunday, the pub will be serving 12 real ales, sourced from within a 36-mile radius of the pub, including the Old Bog Brewery in Headington. The pub will also be selling 11 different types of sausage, including vegetarian traditional Cumberland, and beef.

For those of you who are still confused The Cricketer's Arms is located in the middle of the hamlet of Littleworth, which itself lies between Wheatley and Horspath. Now you know. Coincidentally, it also has "a very successful Aunt Sally team," a traditional pub game whose shadowy but obviously violently sexist (or perhaps violent anti-poultry) past has been long forgotten. But back to a beer and sausage festival. It sounds like the sort of thing Oxford crime solvers Morse and Lewis would have longed for...or at least Lewis. Lewis is one of the great breakfast eaters of literary history just as Morse is a great ale man. See, I have a dream. A dream of being Lewis - but without the superior yet flawed Morse - playing Aunt Sally on the green lawn of a pub while eating breakfast meats all day long as I drink ale. It is a simple dream. The sort of dream I dream in February. People like the good people behind The Cricketer's Arms keep the dream alive.