What an incredible weekend. Pigs One and Two, Winston and Blossom are installed at Red Kite in a slightly surreal sequence. Sam and I left for Derby yesterday morning on the train. We got up super early and arrived at the bizarre St Pancras and King’s Cross stations in time for the train before. Such is the North South Divide, the train to Derby is sited cheek by jowl with Eurostar leaving from St Pancras International separated by tall wire fencing. Is Derby really in another country. It is actually only one and a half hours away. There is still no catering on the train (don’t understand why cups of tea or even water on a train cause Corona). Sam has rightly decreed that there is no point in having a fancy camera if we don’t have a proper lens (at the moment we have a zoom) and insists that first stop on arrival will be a camera exchange shop or we must throw away the camera. Reluctantly I agree and am parted from £600 quid but it is true to say we have been lugging this huge camera round for three years now and hiring photographers which has to be a false economy on some levels! Also there is just so much to photograph at the moment. Life is very exciting.
We meet the delightful Dawn at the end of the Sadlers Gate. Dawn is bearing her cancer with such equanimity and hope I pray she gets through. She is a casualty of the Covid bypass as she did not go to the doctors in time even though she knew something was wrong. She is full of light, aptly named. She has in tow young Connor her foster child, in year six, also full of hope, who quizzes Sam on maths and music [Doja cat] and is delighted when he finds Sam both knowledgeable and ready to play . I liked him too. I find people in the North of England much more easy to deal with. Well, I did till I met the farmers who had our charges waiting in her truck at their Farm. Crikey they looked scary - just about distinguishable from our porcine friends in gabarie and looking like extras from ‘It shouldn’t happen to a vet’. Apparently they were sister and brother. Of course, they took great delight in testing our yuppiness, by telling us we could pee behind a truck, selling us bales of straw (liquid gold on a plate) for £4.50 and tearing Sam off a strip for taking photos of their calves (STRICTLY FORBIDDEN)
Not people we will be seeing again in a hurry I rather suspect. They nearly choked on their carrots when Inigo turned up on the trailer looking like D’artagnan with his long flowing locks and new ranching boots clearly expecting him to have not the slightest clue about how to load pigs. But years of training with Alis and Granny Val at Furzehill Farm have left him fairly experienced with farmyard machinery and he nimbly placed the hurdles in place, effecting a kind of cloacal trailer passage through which W and B could lumber, he kept our townie credentials right up!!!
. Dawn was sad but not too sad as she knows they are going to a better place. Although the price set upon Winston’s head was modest, by god the extras [ not even including the lens] and column inches devoted to the methodology by which we should enclose them has already run into the thousands. Blossom, beloved and pregnant wife [possibly pigs number 3-16] though [shhhh as David does not know as he would freeeeak being already quite apprehensive about the responsibility and the endless stories of escapism - also - serves him right for not reading my blog] was chucked in for free to keep him company and we are really happy about this as it appears she is boss woman. A large , but not as large as him, 500lb Old Spot Sow to his “Coal black Bible Black Large Black” Boar, she took her time to unload on arrival at Red Kite, having rehydrated herself quite delicately from a dustbin lid full of water.
She walked on unsteady legs but soon found a patch of green to sate her hunger before identifying the stream and wending her way towards it. The fairly steep Welsh slate slope toward her new sty did not daunt her and she was most discerning, refusing pig nuts in favour of fresh grass. She then explored the two sties made for her electing for Mike and Inigo’s low hut in favour of the more bustop style one made by Tony the carpenter, slightly randomly not very far away but which combination also led Joel to believe that I had deliberately conspired to thrwart the new nursery by building not one but two permanent sties in the space he was going to plant trees. As l said, communications have been difficult and tempers have frayed in the time of Covid. I had specifically said to Tony the Pony, on the phoney, put it as far away as you can from the other one so the pigs can go there when they are roaming free, but he put it about as close as it could be. Apart from crushing the nursery venture it is lucky as the chaps are so large that they do not both fit in one and one will be very useful for Blossom when she farrows. It is a bit of a joke that absolutely everyone who has seen them has asked if we are going to have piglets. I feel a bit guilty that David tells them Blossom is past it. Oh dear. That was the intention but another Covid casualty is that Dawn couldn’t catch them in time before Winston caught her. Actually, one month later, they have both slimmed down and do fit in there but we are going to have to extend it in preparation for the piglets.
Winston on the other hand was frankly overweight.
Despite the many tales of how the pair could not be caught by the equally overweight sibling farmers [supra] the night before, flipping them and their mother on their backs in the Derbyshire mud, {bravo Winston is wot I say}, they seemed totally docile to us despite his heritage being half wild boar, what they call an Iron Age Pig. D’Artagnan’s second agricultural strategy meant Winston did not charge off the trailer with the full might of his 750 lbs into us, but fairly quietly unloaded with the assistance of some brush wings leaning against the side of the trailer. Perhaps he had been too much weakened by his voyage and then being starved for the day to get him on. In any event, the stress point came subsequently. Having meandered off he alined him self parallel to the stock fencing and it seemed as though it would be but moments before he nosed up the flimsy wire and tossed it to one side . I felt my pig [ as opposed to cod] psychology, previously scorned by hubby would work. I don’t think they want to escape. They are so myopic that I suspect that they can’t even see the wire and it just looks like the wide blue yonder. The light pours in and it seems easy to walk through. Obscure it with something solid looking, I feel, and they will look in another direction. Happy pigs stay at home.
So IN the pouring rain, we nailed some cross poles across the fence and dragged in the ever useful brash I had scored last time I was down from some bourgeois couple who had rid themselves of two perfectly good birch trees to plant leylandii or the like. We had used them to dead hedge the pig paddock over the river and my vision with the brash piled and bales to the right had worked as a directional screen when we offloaded Winston. (They are such lovely trees too, so supple and pretty with their purple branches and silver bark and weeping catkins.)
Winston staggered about a bit feet and then stood parallel to the fence line looking like a coal black, bible black helium balloon, if helium balloons were low flying and filled with lead and stone bricks. Try as we might we could not persuade him to place his trotters on the Welsh slate slope to his new home. We remained in terror that he was just about to plot his escape through the partially obscured boundary wire and we argued about the best way to go about his security . Should we fence on the inside and give them an electric shock at snout level, 2O cm high [ the classic solution]. and then put another layer round at 50 cms high to shock the sheep and ponies. This solution doesn’t feel right for me as I don’t want the pigs to feel enclosed and afraid to forage in the future. What i don’t want is for the pigs to learn they should stay within the perimeter or they get burnt or they won’t want to go further afield and forage.
Anyway we were distracted from our squabbles when suddenly Winston sank down dramatically onto his oversaturated knees and couldn’t move. A terror of the responsibility of taking Dawn’s beloved pig and killing him on the first day washed over me but also rapid calculations that if he was going to do it he should do it quick so she would put it down to the journey rather than my lack of husbandry. Eventually he staggered to his feet but still refused to go down the slope despite poking and prodding, cajoling and shouting. He was very good natured about it but would not budge being used to living on the Derbyshire flats. Inigo’s second wave of agricultural competence kicked in and he grasped the gold dusted straw bales and scattered them before him unfolding a sweet smelling golden carpet. Winston put on his best gold carpet walk and staggered down and like Buttons in Cinderella or maybe Dartagnan in front of Milady, Inigo continued to work his magic all the way to the sty. Once there, he did a bit more staggering and was not quite courageous enough to enter the hut. He had a second spasm mid field and when Blossom was standing over him worriedly I really thought he was a goner. I called Dawn and said should I call the vet..she said no he was probably just tired and dehydrated but in our hearts I know we were both worried. However, after cooking some sausages in the pouring rain { I know and they weren’t vegan}, David got some water into him and he staggered into the bus shelter. Blossom had already put herself to bed in the Mike and Jackie Shelter BUT eventually, in seeing Winston snoring peacefully in another bed, she faithfully came over even though she didn’t quite fit in lay peacefully next to him, trotter to trotter,
even though she was getting quite rained on. And that dear readers is where we found him this morning at 6 o’clock, 9 o'clock and indeed 3 pm this afternoon when he FINALLY deigned to get up for his daily bum scratch, and performed his wiggle wiggle dance.
“And hand in hand on the edge of the sand -
They danced by the light of the moon, the moon, they danced by the light of the moon.”
