Long Noses Come Home

I happened to mention to the brother, the out-of-town one, the Vancouver one – that we’d got our pork coming and he said, for he’s a bit of a wind-up merchant,

I don’t know how you can do that.

Do what?

Eat pork.

What d’ye mean?

Well – eat pigs and there you are keeping pet pigs. I mean, could you imagine eating Lily and Rusty?

So I said to him,

Well. It’s like this. Imagine it. It’s like you keep chickens. You keep them for eggs and meat. Every now and again you pull a few necks, do a bit of plucking, get them in the freezer,

He says,

And your point is?

And I say,

And in the house you’ve got this awesome talking parrot…

So tonight we’re divvying out the pig. Dave and Zoe have got half of Pig No 1, shared with us. He was rather a big lad. Many the time we marvelled at the size of his balls. Marty got half of Pig No. 4, a much smaller pig, although Marty thought it was more pork than he’d seen in a while. That shelf of the freezer Mrs Marty had cleared out was not going to do the job at all.

When all the divvying was done Bert and I sat looking at the boxes that were marked Pig No 1 and Pig No 4. I said,

Can you imagine if we’d named them and those boxes had on them instead of numbers a name like Flossie or Boris or somesuch. Can you imagine how we’d feel about that?

We called those pigs the Long Noses. We were good to them but we did not get friendly with them.