Wednesday, August 2

Our Probus club celebrated Christman in July yesterday - a day late and fewer people than we expected.  It's well known that it's impossible to organise a function in Deloraine and expect to predict numbers.  I asked several times who was coming, who wasn't coming and who hoped to come but, as the day approached, I was no wiser.  I crossed my fingers and told the pub 18.  In fact 14 turned up, including two I thought were overseas.  The pub proprietors just shrugged their shoulders; they've seen it all before.

Our meal was nice, three meats on a bed of mash, and a Bain Marie filled with various vegetables.  The meats were turkey, pork and a slice of ham: not my favourite meats but Christmassy enough for the occasion.

I've never been a fan of roast pork.  I think it goes back to my childhood and the books I read, Drums of Mer, The Coral Island, etc which talked about cannibals.  Humans were called long pig because the story was that they tasted just like pig.  In my fevered imagination the corollary must also be true: pork must taste like human flesh.  No thank-you, I'll stick to lamb.

There's also the tale of the Edinburgh barber, Sweeney Todd who slashed the throats of his customers, tipped their bodies into the cellar where his accomplice baked them into pork pies.  

And, it's no coincidence that the criminal classes call policemen 'pigs', and I believe surgeons can transplant pig valves into a human heart.  Are pigs and humans interchangeable?

As you can imagine, I also have an aversion to pork sausages, but that's another story entirely.