I’ve always loved pigs, so now I’m a pig farmer. Cheerful Charlie Ireland, my land agent, says this is the stupidest idea I’ve had yet and wants no part of it. And Kaleb was so unpleased that he got into his pick-up truck and went to Cornwall for a week.
My logic, though, is sound. Pigs are much cheaper to buy than cows or sheeps, and unlike most other farmyard animals they don’t produce one or two babies. They hose them out like machinegun bullets. So you buy ten pigs for a few quid and three months later you have ten million. That’s profit, right there. Pure, naked profit.
To make the financials look even better I decided to keep the pigs in a field that was full of potatoes that had been rendered unharvestable by the summer drought. I was going to let them rot but now, thanks to my brilliant new plan, they’d be used as pig food.
Charlie responded to this argument by rolling his eyes and going home, which meant that Lisa and I had to spend a week or two learning an all-new language: pig. You might think it’s easy. You’ve got piglets and sows and boars, and that’s it. But you’re wrong. In the same way that cow and sheep farmers use words that would cause arguments in a game of Scrabble, I’ve learnt that in “pig” you have weaners and gilts and that when you have a sow that isn’t pregnant you describe her as “empty”.
And then we had to get into the business of what breed to buy. The choice is endless but, in the end, we went for something called the Oxford Shandy and Black. Partly because they have comedic ears that grow over their eyes, so they literally cannot see where they’re going, and partly because “shandy and black” sounds like the sort of thing a northern girl would order in a Zante nitespot.
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But mostly because it’s a breed that is thought to have been created in Wychwood Forest, which I can see from my kitchen window. And because a few years ago there were only a handful of boars left in the entire world. This, then, is a breed that gives the panda hope.
We bought 15 of them and they all came in a shade of metallic bronze that I last saw in 1973 on an NSU Ro 80. But unlike the NSU they are not Wankel-powered. Oh no. These guys like the full enchilada. They even use sex as a defence mechanism.
I learnt this when I had to move the man pig from a pen containing two sows that I hoped were no longer empty, into a pen containing two sows that definitely were. He didn’t want to go, and to express his unwillingness he leapt onto the back of one of the sows and started pumping away frantically. “Look,” he seemed to be saying, “I’ve fallen in love. Please don’t move me.”
Hmm. I could see that because she was enormous and he wasn’t, he hadn’t climbed far enough up her back to get connected. But he couldn’t see this because his ears were in the way. And I doubt he could sense it either because his penis is so thin, there couldn’t possibly be any room up there for nerve endings.
A pig’s penis is interesting. We hear often that it’s shaped like a corkscrew, but when it’s aroused it’s more like a really long pipe cleaner. And, cleverly, it can be steered remotely like the back of a San Francisco fire truck. Seriously. The pig has control over its direction of travel. He can go right while it goes left. And when he’s concentrating on doing that, he isn’t really paying attention to someone who’s telling him to “get down”.
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So how do you get a determined and lovestruck pig off the back of his girlfriend? The solution to this tricky problem presented itself moments later when one of the empty sows from the other pen arrived on the scene. “Hmm,” thought the boar, “fresh meat. And she’s more my size.”
He immediately climbed from the back of his larger girlfriend, and in no time at all was giving it the full Barry White with the newbie. This made the old sow unhappy. As you’d expect. So, as the man pig unfurled his pipe cleaner and steered it into the new girl, the big pig attacked.
There then followed what might fairly be called a bitch fight. The empty sow was frothing at the mouth and frantically trying to stand still for her new man while being savaged by a much larger rival who was plainly upset that he’d broken off their engagement mid-flow and taken off with someone else. And then the second sow joined in.
I have read a few books on pig breeding, so I said to Lisa that if you massage a pig’s back it thinks it’s having sex and will stand still. Amazingly it worked. The attack pig I’d selected stopped trying to bite the sow that was having actual sex and stood there while I rubbed her back as she softly grunted the Fifty Shades grunt of pig contentment.
Lisa, however, had taken my instructions about pretending to have sex literally. She had gone round to the back of the other attack pig and was using her hips to thrust away at its rear end. This was quite a spectacle. But then, mercifully, it started to rain. And it was big, cold, sideways rain. Rain so opaque that anyone driving by wouldn’t have been able to witness what looked like the scene from Dante’s 17th circle of hell.
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And it wasn’t a brief scene either. I can tell you here that a pig is not a rabbit. It likes its sex to go on for quite a while. So the boar was pumping away, and Lisa was pumping away, and I was engaged in what I hoped wouldn’t be a happy-ending massage, and we were all drenched from the downpour and covered in mud. And still the boar hadn’t finished.
When he did, after about a quarter of an hour, the quantities he produced were simply unbelievable. Forget 10cc. This was measurable in gallons. And so was the splashback. I was drenched in it. And then as I stood there in horror, the pig I’d been massaging turned round and vomited explosively into my pocket. Well, you would if you’d been forced to stand there and watch your boyfriend empty his seed into the back of someone he’d only just met.
I’d been told that I should have got the empty sows pregnant with artificial insemination. Everyone said that, for a novice, this process can produce some hilarious results. But in my farming enterprise I’ve tried to keep it real and avoid stuff that I knew wouldn’t work, no matter how amusing the results might be. I really didn’t want to go down the Channel 5 Rebecca Loos pig masturbation route.
But while trying to play it straight I’d ended up as a receptacle for every sort of pig juice you can think of. And Lisa felt like she’d been in an episode of Black Mirror. Plus, her new Canada Goose coat is ruined.
And one day the pig-owning experience will get worse because I’ll have to send them “down the road” to be turned into sausages and ham and pork chops and bacon. And all so you can go to the supermarket and moan about how expensive meat is these days.
