The Pork Pie

So, this is how it was, OK? I came home from a trip, yet another conference. I was tired, a bit spaced really – these things can be a bit of a proceeding, what with all the liquid social events. For some reason C was out. Anyway I made some tea, sat and watched the telly for half an hour, checked my email and Facebook and then looked in the fridge for something to eat.

A pork pie.

I found a pork pie. OK? This might not seem at all odd to you, until I mention that both C and I are vegan, and have been for some years. So…I thought maybe she’d bought it as a treat for the dogs, and forgot about it.

But then on friday, I said “Did you get that pie for the dogs?”

“What pie?”

“The one in the fridge…the pork pie.”

Needless to say she looks and can’t find it. Is this odd? I’m always looking in our fridge or freezer for things that are supposed to be there and can’t find them. Neither of us are all that tidy, and we tend to put odds and ends in the fridge, as C says; “until they go off” and we can throw them away. So again I forgot about it.

But then a week later I’m doing a curry and looking in the fridge for some coriander and ginger, and I find the fucking pork pie again. This time I’m tempted to just bin it, this non-existent pork pie. But I think, no, I’ll leave it to prove to her that it was there. But of course, as you have guessed, when she looks it isn’t there.

I’ve never been a believer in the supernatural. Or God. If you can’t poke it or prod it, for my money its not there. OK? So a thing like this kind of creeps up on you – imperceptibly it begins to challenge your assumptions. After these casual encounters, I finally thought, right, so on saturday morning I open the fridge and there it is, the pork pie, at the back behind a jar of slightly old olives and some plastic tubs of leftovers. But when I empty all the stuff of the shelf, its not there. So I empty all the other shelves, and the salad box at the bottom…no pork pie. Well, I put everything back and just as I was about to close the door I glimpsed it, on the bottom shelf behind a jar of vegan mayo and a plastic tub of mushrooms.

Now I like some ghost stories, I’ve read some M.R. James and that. And at this point I’m starting to think, shit! I’m in a ghost story and we have got a haunted fridge. I open the door again, and there it is, so I call C and this time she can see it too. Again we take out all the stuff from the fridge and again we find it gone. The best I can say is that it was an opportunity to chuck all those odd bits of left over pasta, etc, that should have gone a week ago.

Foolishly we had bought this Bosch fridge second hand, off Ebay. A misguided drive to save money as I recall. As is usually the case, if you are willing to collect, things go much cheaper in the auctions. It was nearly new, and not too far away, on a farm just outside Maesteg. I didn’t go, either I was doing something to the house, or I had a hangover. C drove up there. She said the woman was very nice. Selling off the contents of the farmhouse that had belonged to her brother. Didn’t say why, apparently, and C didn’t ask.

So now I’m thinking, why was this woman selling off her brother’s crap, and what happened to the brother? These days you don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to find things out, do you? We have Google for that. So I checked the address and name from the Ebay transaction. South Wales Echo, “Farmer Owain James missing”. Didn’t say a whole lot, not a major story and anyway people are always disappearing these days. One thing that did give me a bit of a frisson. He kept pigs.

OK, so that was it really; I was too busy with the intricacies of phenomenology and trying to understand Heidegger to waste too much time on a phantom pork pie and a disappearing Welsh farmer. So I thought, fuck it, if that thing wants to haunt our fridge so what.

I think it was a couple of months later I was watching Wales Today on BBC1. God knows why, given that local news is generally about as much fun as watching paint dry. Whatever, there’s a story about food contamination in a Cardiff processing plant. The wrong kind of things turning up in pies. Pork Pies. Never mind horse DNA in Tesco burgers, this was bits of human in a pork pie, but don’t some cultures call human flesh “long pig”? What caught my attention was they had traced the contamination to Mochyn Isaf farm, Maesteg.

The story unravelled over the next few days. A forensic search of the farm found human remains in one of the pig arcs. DNA tests gave them Owain James. Turns out he’d been eaten by his own pigs. “Foul play was not suspected”, he’d probably just had a heart attack while humping a bag of pig nuts. Bloke had apparently been done twice on animal welfare. Serve him right.