Some questions, puzzles and fascinating ideas are currently rattling through my brain. They are all news items that have floated to the surface in press stories in the past while. Was Gerry Adams ever in the IRA ? ….is one . Was Peter Robinson ever a part of a terrorist grouping called Ulster Resistance? Did our current Prime Minister, David Cameron have a passing, youthful phase concerning a mild form of necrophilia with a soupcon of zoophilia on the side? Is he in love with a piglet? Do any of those things make any of them unable to currently lead their various political parties ?
There is a story circulating that’s currently knocking the Edward Heath PM “abuse” story of the last few months , off its tacky, sticky pedestal. This one concerns the current Prime Minister of the UK, who, while at his time as a student at Oxford, seemingly took part in some bizarre rituals and a modicum of sexual excess. In some circles that might actually put a feather in his cap and that added little whiff of brimstone and adventure might do him a power of good, taking the glossy ,well buffed sheen from his glowing cheeks and his bland political story. Apparently he joined a dining club of sorts…like some latterday Hellfire Club , called the Piers Gaveston, named after King Edward II’s lover .Well some of these kings made it up as they went along .Look at the convoluted state Henry VIII got himself into before he had finished.The initiation rite in this particular society involved the wonderfully extraordinary suggestion that” the future PM inserted a private part of his anatomy into the animal’s mouth.” Hijinks , for future political leaders don’t get any more interesting than that. It would be interesting to hear the questions his wife is now asking in the privacy of their bedroom.Whether it is true or false is now beside the point as the seed has already been sown by one of his distinguished Oxford contemporaries. It’s like that question whether or not Gerry Adams was in the IRA or whether Peter Robinson was a member of the Ulster Resistance.That horse has already bolted , as they say ….and the public ‘s insatiable need has been fed for a while. The public already wants to believe these things and some of them might even be true.
It’s a curious state of affairs. Not too many of us would want our chequered youthful pasts laid bare in livid, vivid detail…but then we humans are, if nothing else, curious little beasts .We really want to know all the juicy gossip , which is why so many gossip magazines proliferate on our news-stands. We want to know everything about our public figures….all the juicy details. It’s the price a “public” figure pays…for being a public figure, after all. The price of fame and that.
They say that, of all our fellow animals on planet earth , our familial cousins the chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and lemurs , notwithstanding , there is plenty of evidence to suggest that we are very alike our swine -relatives .They are an incredibly intelligent creature for one thing. Us “long pigs”, as we were referred, in the nicely slow – baked form ,in Maori and Polynesian lore , during the 1800’s ,share many of the same physiology and traits as our other relatives in the “swine” or pig family . There is current scientific talk that the pig shares some 98% of the same genome as we humans and indeed there are many physical similarities. Our internal organs are laid out in much the same array …heart , lungs , kidneys and so on. To the amateur cannibal , apparently our flesh has a similar taste when properly cooked and presented. Even a connoisseur of comestibles and fine -dining such as the fictional Hannibal Lecter might have problems differentiating between some nice smoked back bacon with his egg and chips and a finely sliced sliver of smoked humanity, such is the similarity in taste .It’s no surprise that a lion might take down a man with the same alacrity and ease as he might dispense a rutting, tuskered boar . The resulting meal would be of similar quality. The pig may have the crubeens for the lion to gnaw on instead of those long , boney, marrowfat fingers, but other than that , there’d be a feast fit for the king of beasts.
Then there’s the same curiosity that I mention . Pigs are sociable creatures brimming with noisy curiosity , never happier than when chundering and cavorting about together in little gangs , while rooting about in the muck and the mire.That’s not unlike our political classes when you come to study it.
Recent findings, published in “Nature”, the scientific journal , also show that pigs suffer from exactly the same genetic and protein malfunctions that account for many human diseases, including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and obesity. So George Orwell was n’t too far from the realms of reality when he made the comparisons in his book “Animal Farm”. The studies into the nature and origins of swine have found that the creatures are very adaptable, extremely easy to seduce with food and susceptible to domestication, which is how we lured wild pigs into our social orbit in the first place .In that respect, they are much like humans who allowed the growing of wheat to draw them away from a looser, free life of irresponsible, unattached hunting and gathering, to a settled existence of banally hard , laborious endeavour, enduring a daily toil from dawn until dusk, tilling fields in the thrall of a glorified grass ; weeding and protecting its growth from pests and disease …ending literally in the daily grind{ing} of its seeds into flour and the stuff and the staff of life …our daily bread. .The protection of the flour in communal stores, finally playing its part in domesticating and settling mankind into communities. Yes…we’re not unlike pigs in that respect…..easily seduced by food. So Mr Cameron had plenty in common with his dead little party friend, although his old school – friends and he seem to have taken this friendship to some extreme measures, not unlike the lad expressing his erotic love for the warm and welcoming apple -pie in the gross-out comedy film , “American Pie”.
Pigs are worth studying closely …if not that closely. Because of their similarities to us, poring into the genetic coding in the swine make-up could unlock untold new treatments to benefit mankind in its continuing war with illness and disease.
Maybe that similarity and closeness to humans is what drew David Cameron and his university chums to integrate these human-like mammals into their bizarre initiation rites involving placing a hidden part of the initiate’s …anatomy into the mouth of the dead pig. They may have thought, better to hide their “toes” in its mouth, than to eat thinly cut slices of the poor dead beast.
Of course , they may have done both of those things and then some. Then again, Mr Cameron may just have been acting in an over- friendly way to a near-enough relation.
After a week or so of kicking seven shades out of the leader of the Labour Party ,Jeremy Corbyn , the press may soon begin a new assault .This pig might also eventually take wings and fly… I’m not sure the stirred -up imagery of our PM and his porcine pal , will not be too soon forgotten ,anyway.
Excellent Article!!!
Gives a whole new meaning to the expression `putting lipstick on a pig…`
hi Jude , I’ve somehow dropped the word “leader” out of the last paragraph…after Labour Party…. a quick edit is needed
A prick in a pig!
One of the first questions Sam Cam (not Miss Piggy surely) might ask her spouse, in Shakespearean style of course: ‘Is that a pork sausage I see before me’?
As far as our relationship to porcines is concerned, it reminds me of an old saying about a single-minded person: ‘He’s hard to turn, he’s like a pig going to hoke’.
A question I would like to ask: ‘How is a pig with Alzheimers diagnosed as such’?
A suppose a pig with dementia would be recognised much as humans are… acting disoriented, walking in circles, or staring into corners or into space. They might sleep more or at odd times. My father suffered from dementia for the last ten years of his life and the first signs were him repeatedly re-making meals and forgetting that he’d eaten.. leaving little plates of food in the fridge or the cooker ….not knowing whether or not he was hungry or not and so on …repetitive stuff and conversations as his memory wasted .i’d say you’d start to notice the odd thing in an animal that you were used to ,Sherdy.I’d imagine pets get dementia too if they get very old and you’d notice it..
I have a country friend rearing three not now so little Pigs for slaughter. Given their fine quality of life, it is hard indeed to imagine a finer life and diet for these organic “Projects”, for though my little son wished to give them names, he was judiciously dissuaded from such a human indulgence. They wanted to eat my doggy through the enclosure, so my wee son decided on not being so disposed to indulging them personal identities. The meat industry is endemically disposed to cruelty of an unnecessary kind. We visited, and my Conservative minded unionist with a small u ex-uni friend assured me, despite his pig headed political marriage to dogma, that he would not allow a visit from our “Glorious Leader” given that he wishes his Projects to remain insulated from such predilections that seem to inhabit the pycho sexual inclinations of Mr Cameron. I suggested Corbyn’s propensity towards natural Harmony, to which he grunted….though his opposition to Corbyn seems to be waning…he is a man of integrity he concurs, and certainly not a Pig.