My first ever pig

Broadcaster and presenter Paul Heiney has written about his tempestuous relationship with a Large Black pig in his brilliant new book, A Pig called Alice. In this extract, he reveals how the idea of the purchase came about

- Paul Heiney

To understand how Alice the pig first came into my life, you must appreciate a very strange direction that my life had taken. Somewhere down the line, for reasons I still do not fully understand, I had become completely besotted with a totally romantic idea that I would become a farmer. Me? A farmer? Crazy idea. I was hardly a gardener, let alone anyone capable of expanding a few basic skills in the vegetable patch onto the scale needed to grow a decent crop of anything. I couldn’t tell wheat from barley, a tup from a gilt or one end of a plough from another. But once the notion had been planted it seemed to flourish, watered and fed by ambition way beyond my skills. I simply had to do it. Something, someone, was dragging me down one of life’s new pathways and I knew I must follow. Just to add another layer of complexity to an already fanciful project, I decided that it would be a smallscale model of a working Victorian farm. I was going to deliberately turn back the clock, drag history to the present day. It would have no tractors, but instead employ carthorses; the Suffolk Punch would be my choice, being the native breed of the county in which I was living.