Thursday, August the 3rd, 2006

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A Further Note on Pigs

Yesterday I made passing mention of Popsy The Pig, and I have been asked to point out that said pig is a fictional pig rather than a real, living, breathing pig of flesh and blood. One might think this was obvious. Not so, as far as serial Hooting Yard correspondent Dr Ruth Pastry is concerned.

O Key! she writes, in yet another frantically typed missive from wherever it is she lives, I have been concerned for some time that you do not make plain what is fact and what is fiction. We all know that educational standards are falling apart, that tinies today are sent to “community education hubs” rather than schools, and that they learn nothing because the blinkered nitwits who oversee things are far too busy rolling out and embedding robust initiatives and driving forward 360-degree change interfaces under the direction of a faith-based challenge champion. These are the kind of people, remember, who see an arrow and call it a “graphic directional pointing emblem”. Regrettable though it is, you need to bear in mind that your future readership will need explicit guidance to distinguish a pretend pig from a real one. To apprehend the full import of your words, readers have to be absolutely clear what you are talking about. It goes without saying that they need to have confidence that you know what you're talking about in the first place. It does sometimes seem to me that you have about as much idea about real pigs as you do about birds. In future I suggest that you use some kind of colour coding system. Plain black text for facts, red italics for things you have made up, and bold green type for when you are wittering on about the many, many subjects of which you are profoundly ignorant. That should sort the wheat from the chaff, and I suspect there will be a huge amount of chaff. Yours in Christ, Ruth Pastry (Dr).

Entertaining though such rants may be, I have no intention of taking Dr Pastry's advice. Unlike her, I respect my readers' intelligence, and I think it unlikely that anyone would confuse the fictional Popsy-with-a-'y' The Pig and the real Popsie-with-an-'i'-and-an-'e' The Pig. The latter pig was, of course, enstyed in the grounds of the pneumatic power tower on the other side of the fields beyond the Big Unexplained Building On The Hill, where it was regularly visited by Dobson, who fed it with an enticing variety of fallen fruits and items of confectionery. Though he pretended a convincing gruffness, Dobson had a soft spot for Popsie The Pig, who could reduce him to tears by, for example, grunting, or wallowing in a particular patch of mud. In the autumn of 1955, Dobson trudged across the fields to the pig sty twice a day, his pockets filled with pig treats for Popsie.

It was on one such trudge, a dawn one, as winter began to bite, that the out of print pamphleteer was accosted by the local Inspector Of Pig, Squirrel, And Goat Food, with his pointy cap and gleaming golden blazer buttons.

“My name is Piccolo, and my mind is a chaos,” said this man, pointing a futuristic ray gun at Dobson's head, “And I am the local Inspector Of Pig, Squirrel, And Goat Food. My word is law in these parts. Empty your pockets.”

Dobson had been threatened with ray gunsbefore, but never at dawn in the middle of a field, so reluctantly he did as he was bid, tossing fallen fruits and items of confectionery on to the ground. A partly-gnawed toffee apple struck the boot of the Inspector and rolled into a ditch.

“Get into the ditch and retrieve that partly-gnawed toffee apple,” shouted the Inspector, waving his ray gun in a haphazard way that betrayed his unfamiliarity with it. Dobson ducked and shimmied and swiftly disarmed him, dislodged his pointy cap and pushed him into the ditch.

“My ankle is sprained,” whined the Inspector.

Dobson eyed him with contempt and picked up the fallen fruits and items of confectionery one by one.

“Listen to me, Inspector Of Pig, Squirrel, And Goat Food, or whoever you are,” said Dobson, “I am going to continue trudging across the field until I reach the pig sty. Then I will feed these fallen fruits and items of confectionery to the pig known throughout this land as Popsie The Pig. That is Popsie with an 'i' and an 'e', a real pig of flesh and blood and bone and muscle, no mere fictional pretend pig of someone's fancy. Fictional pigs need no feeding, Inspector, as your superiors must have made plain to you when they handed you a requisition slip for that futuristic ray gun and sent you here. While I am gone, eat of that partly-gnawed toffee apple, and fill in your forms. When I return, I will fashion a makeshift stretcher out of branches and leaves, and I will drag you across the fields to my home, and I will install you on the sofa in the sitting room, and I will feed you with moretoffee apples, and with soup, until your sprained ankle is sprained no more, and then you may go on your way, armed once more with your ray gun, with your pointy cap set straight upon your head, and your pockets stuffed with certain of my pamphlets which you are to bring to the attention of your superiors, works in which I have addressed in enormous detail the topic of the proper feeding of not only pigs, and squirrels, and goats, but also cows and horses and stoats and crows and weasels and cormorants and guillemots and badgers, both real and fictional. The overwhelming genius of my recommendations has been ignored until now, and this has caused me anguish that you can barely imagine from your position sprawled in a ditch with a sprained ankle and only a partly-gnawed toffee apple for sustenance. But you will do me this service, and by doing so your name will live forever in the hearts of those who, from St Francis of Assisi onwards, have striven to strengthen the links that bind us to the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and those creatures that creep upon their bellies, and those that slither and wriggle in the muck, the real ones and those that are fictional, like Popsy The Pig when Popsy is spelled with a 'y'. It is you who will be remembered, Inspector, not me, for I am but a mere out of print pamphleteer. I have no pointy cap, as you do, nor a blazer with gleaming golden buttons, nor do I covet them. Mark my words, and mark them well. And now I must trudge onward to the pig sty.”

Alas, when Dobson returned to the ditch, the Inspector Of Pig, Squirrel, And Goat Food had scarpered. He had only ever been a phantom from another world and another time, and as Dobson threw the futuristic ray gun into a nearby waste chute, he realised with a mixture of despair and disgust that his words had been wasted, and that when he got home, as the bleak winter sun rose higher in the sky, he would find those pamphlets which addressed in enormous detail the proper feeding of pigs and squirrels and goats and cows and horses and stoats and crows and weasels and cormorants and guillemots and badgers, both real and fictional, still lying unread in the drawer of his writing desk, and he had no one to give them to, no one to carry them away, far away, to distant buildings in distant lands where important people made important decisions about the feeding of Popsie The Pig and all the other creatures upon this planet that Carl Sagan called a pale blue dot.