Vera Lynn is such a fusspot. You’d never heard the likes of it! Just this morning, she told Constance and I that she’d sent back a delivery of geese because she didn’t think their feet would be good enough for her famous goose foot soup. The way she goes on about that soup, you’d think it was the elixir of all life or something, but everyone knows it’s just the regular old recipe with a bit of extra cayenne and mustard seed added.
Where in the process, precisely, these are added for the specific kick Vera Lynn’s recipe gives the goose feet remains a mystery, which is how she manages to win the blue ribbon in the soup category at the fair every year. Maybe being a fusspot is what makes all the difference. Still, she doesn’t need to be sending back crates of geese – some of us here in the village would have been more than happy to take them off her hands, imperfect feet be damned.
I mean, really – it’s not like the stock is going to be vastly affected by anything by the most terrible foot conditions. Cheltenham geese might have slightly smaller feet than the ones Vera Lynn normally uses, but some would argue that this gives them a more delicate flavour, if anything. Sure, it’s possible that they had some sort of fungal infection, in which case Vera Lynn would have been in the right to send them back. But how often does that happen these days? The goosemongers are pretty onto it ever since that one time a few years back, and now it’s virtually not a thing.
Who made Vera Lynn the local goose foot specialist, anyway? I guess my concern is that the goosemongers are going to see her as a representative of the whole village, and that they’ll stop coming here, or at least stop bringing the best birds. What’s the point if they’re just going to get sent back? In short, she’s doing nobody any favours, except maybe the geese themselves.