The Sausage Walk, October 2026

The Annual Sausage Walk

Hyde Park (Usually)

There are certain moments in British life when you realise the nation has quietly lost its mind, and lost it in the most agreeable way. One of these came to me last year on a grey October Sunday in Hyde Park, where I found myself among several hundred dachshunds, every one of them dressed for Halloween, and not one of them, as far as I could tell, consulted on the matter. A dachshund is already a sort of joke at nature's expense, a dog built to the specifications of a draught excluder. Put one in a pumpkin costume and it stops being a dog altogether and becomes a small orange vegetable with an air of quiet grievance. I watched one go past dressed as a hot dog, which struck me as both the most obvious costume and somehow the bravest.

What is remarkable is the scale of it. They came in their hundreds, marching along the paths in a long, low, waddling column, like a very short army that had misread the invitation. There were witches and vampires, a ghost whose sheet trailed so far behind that he appeared to be pulling his own laundry, and a bumblebee who had clearly reached the end of his patience about forty yards in and simply lay down on the gravel, legs in the air, refusing all negotiation. Their owners, meanwhile, beamed with the particular pride of people who have spent a fortnight hand-stitching a tiny cape and wish everyone to know it. I asked one woman how long her dog's spider outfit had taken. "Three weekends," she said, without a flicker of embarrassment, and I liked her enormously for it.

I have walked in a good many parks in my time, and I can tell you that nowhere else would this happen with quite such solemn cheerfulness. The Americans would sell tickets and the French would hold a seminar on it. The British simply turn up in the drizzle, stand about holding cups of tea, and coo at a dachshund dressed as Dracula as if it were the most natural thing in the world. And perhaps it is. As the procession wound off towards the Serpentine, a long caravan of tiny capes and wobbling antennae, I found myself thinking that a country capable of this cannot be entirely beyond hope. Then a sausage dog dressed as a mummy unravelled completely and bolted after a pigeon, and I decided it probably could.