A pig’s…

We were in the pub and chatting about old times, and began to chat about our different experiences at university. It had started with us talking about Croydon, where I friends from Devon used to live and where my husband had been to the Croydon College of Art, a prestigious art school. He remembered being sent out by his tutor to the butcher’s to buy a pig’s head for the students to draw; they spent their lesson earnestly portraying the head of the unfortunate beast and at the end, my husband asked what he should do with it. This was many years ago before refrigerators being cheap and available everywhere, and his tutor told him to run the sink full of cold water and put the head in it ready for the next drawing lesson… this was on a Friday… the next drawing lesson was on Friday… I leave you to imagine what happened on the Friday.

I had a different experience… while I was at Manchester Polytechnic the student’s union organized a medieval banquet, the centre piece of which was a pig’s head, cooked, and suitably decorated by our friend Rosemary’s mum. Rosemary lived in a small place in Derbyshire called New Mills and I have no idea why her mum was able to provide a decorated pig’s head. I can’t really remember the banquet very well except it was a great success and we all had a wonderful time, mainly, I suspect due to the amount of mead we consumed… as we were tidying and clearing up there was a dispute over what should happen to the pig’s head. Then, as now, I hated waste, and a pig’s head had a lot of meat on it.

The following day I was going home for Christmas, so the alternative to throwing the thing away was for me to take it home. Now, my dad being a country boy, no doubt would love to attack a pig’s head, so I reasoned. So… the following day, loaded down with all my things, and my Christmas presents, I drove my little Austin, my A35, 200 miles home, with the pig sitting on the passenger seat beside me, grinning, with an apple in its mouth and green and red icing decorating its mighty brow.