ME AND THE PIG FARMER

I met a pig farmer yesterday. He told me all about the intricacies of looking after 7,000 pigs. And by 'looking after' I of course mean feeding, weighing... and turning into pork chops.

I learned lots. You can (roughly) tell how heavy a pig is from looking at it. If you switch on a light at a particular brightness, pigs will just walk towards it as though it were the sun; pigs grow a bit like athletes and it's more expensive to give them vitamins; tall pigs are actually heavier than short, fat ones, and, if you can build a handheld way of (accurately) weighing a pig you'll probably be a millionaire.

There were so many questions I wanted to ask but couldn't! Would pigs be extinct if we were all vegetarians? How will Brexit affect the ability to transport pigs? How much is each pig worth? How fast can they run?

The farmer told me about the fine art of mixing their food by computer. Apparently the system that does that is unbelievably complicated (which I did not doubt) and often breaks down at 2am.

"We have to call our guy out and get him to fix it," said he. "And sometimes he says it's a fault in the process machinery and we have to call that guy out too an' let them argue about it."

I didn't doubt that either. Though I suddenly had a lot of sympathy for the software guy whose phone rings in the middle of the night because his code's broken.

"All ones an' zeros, isn't it."

"I always think of it like a switchboard of on and off switches," said I, doing my best impersonation of a technical author, "The board can get complicated depending on which switches are turned on. Imagine that but with several million or even several billion switches..."

We got on very well in the end, the pig farmer and I. I doubt we could have been more different: him tall and sun-blessed, with strong leather hands and boots; me, short and nerdy, talking about how computers work with my quick, soft voice. On reflection though, I think we were both well-seasoned listeners, and (I don't want to give away a super power but...) I think that might have had a lot to do with it.

"Middle of the night's the best time to load 'em up," he said. "Switch on the lamps an' the driver opens the door 'n' they all queue up to climb on the back of the lorry."

"Aw, poor little things, " I said, without really thinking.

The pig farmer gave me a quizzical look. Well of course he did! He was talking to a person who was only just suddenly realising that "This little piggy went to market" had never once meant what I thought it had.