THE PIGS OF GOLDILOCKS FARM

A gruesome tale of intelligence in the pig world, and murder

It was a remarkable season and Goldilocks Farm was a meadowy sort of place down the road from where Albert Finnigan courted the love of his life, one Isobella Sweetheart. Whilst Albert whispered sweet and powerful nonsenses into his dearest Isobella's ears and tarried with her in a verdant bower hidden from the eyes of other mortals in a shaded corner of his deep and very green back garden, the lives on Goldilocks Farm went on in harmony and even smiles because the land was wonderfully productive and the farmer was dead.

He, Farmer Giles, that is, lay decomposing on his bed after a night of troubled dreams that had given way to the kind of black silence we all dread, and the pigs in his free-range fields began wondering why nourishing buckets of slops weren't arriving on cue like they always had.

It had been a hard life for Farmer Giles because he's spent most of it with a spendthrift witch of a wife with a short fuse and sharp, angular features which he'd long ago learned to hate. It was that hatred that had caused him to still her heart with a good sharp blade above half a week ago, an activity that had troubled him ever since, not for fear of being caught out by the forces of law and order but from dread of having to leave his pigs and become incarcerated in some cell somewhere. And it was that very nagging fear that had stopped his own heart that nightmare of a dreaming night.

But to his pigs.

Rather than be taken to the nearest abattoir in order to have their blood let and their guts mashed into feed for other pigs to gobble up they found themselves having to survive by their wits, and as anyone might know some pigs have enormous wits. Far from being creation's dumbest creatures they are arguably the most sensible. After all, rather than fear the mess of getting a few spots of dirt on their nice pink skins they fairly wallow in muck, which is nice and cooling and doesn't need a factory to produce at huge environmental cost and does the job just as well as fancy lotions.

And there's always one. There's always one spark brighter than the rest. There's always one pig that can see beyond the near horizons which is the lot of most creatures of the porcine variety. And in the later Farmer Giles' piggery there was one. And despite the limitations imposed on piggy speech by a cruel nature it was called Wendy.

In any other respect Wendy was a perfectly normal sow. She found real delight in rolling in the thickets of muds, of snorting in the brownest of puddles, of letting any number of the randy hogs that also lived on the farm to have carnal relations with her whenever it pleased her because the sensation was plain nice.

But her favourite activity was, surprise surprise, thinking.

Farmer Giles hadn't been dead for a week when she thought they might run out of food once all the slimy worms and other creatures with unbelievably ugly features had been rooted out of the soft ground and consumed. And as hunger began to touch her belly she sat and thought and put two and two together. And, as is the way of truly intelligent pigs, she arrived at four.

Four was the number of posts that had been used to construct the free-range field's entrance gate. And four was the number of teensy baby pigs growing inside her pregnant body, all of which needed nourishing on a constant basis. And four was the number of days that had passed since she had seen the late lamented Farmer Giles sneak out of his farmhouse carrying a load of dead flesh that she recognised, by the aroma, as the disintegrating remains of Mrs Giles, and dug a pit in which he had buried his fragrant burden the other side of the four-barred gate.

So four was quite a significant number and it thrilled her when she thought of it.

Then she made an amazing mental leap and almost raced to the gate. It was an ancient rather rustic affair made from timbers that had been subjected to a great deal of weather and rains and she loved it because it had always been there.

The thing about free-range piggeries is they are quite well-populated places - some might same over-populated - and Wendy had no problem nuzzling half a dozen of the bigger hogs towards the gate with promises of joys to come.

Bright as a button she might have been, but linguistically competent she was not. As has already been suggested mother nature in the shape of cruel evolution had not equipped her with a particular versatile vocal system, but wherever you find bright pigs you find ways and means. And her ways and means involved a little bit of shoving and nipping until her half dozen hogs got the message and charged with their well-fed weight up to the gate and knocked it flat, the almost-rotted four posts flying higgledy piggledy just about everywhere.

It was then that the aroma of Mrs Giles, which had been rising through the soils from the pit Mr Giles had placed her in, reached the half dozen hogs and forced them there and then, to confront their own hunger. And that hunger was immense. It was always pretty substantial, but after a lean period during which slimy invertebrates had all-but dried up, it was immense.

Pigs are used to snuffling in the mud and it didn't take them long to unearth a by-now well-rotted Mrs Giles. There's nothing like well-rotted flesh to appeal to the appetites of pigs and the six hogs set in to demolish the tasty flesh they had unearthed with the greatest of wills whilst Wendy herself went off in search of sweeter meats.

And down the lane she found it. In a bower in a garden, all cuddled up together and whispering sweet nonsenses and cuddling as if cuddling was about to go out of fashion, were two human lovers.

Wendy ate the girl first, for she was the sweeter, her flesh the tastier and she the simplest when it came to reducing her to lifelessness. Which it must be said was a mistake, for the bigger human, the male, distraught by what was happening to the love of his life, took an axe to Wendy and chopped her head clean off, which may have delayed somewhat the evolution of the pig as a future ruler of Planet Earth.

And then in order to remain close to his love, he found himself slicing rashers from Wendy's flanks and frying them in an iron pan over an open fire under the sun before revelling in the joys of fresh bacon on a summer's day.

It had been a remarkable season.