This week, Ian McEwan won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. His reward? Some champagne and a Gloucester Old Spot piglet, named after his book. Marina Lewycka had that honour in 2005.
I never heard what happened to the Old Spot who gambolled away into the Powys countryside bearing the name A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. I never saw her again. She had nine gorgeous piglets, and the farmer who owned her assured me that on account of them it would probably be a while before she was sent to the great bacon-slicer in the sky. I never got any bacon, either, but I got plenty of champagne, which was nice.
For the photo-op, I had to climb into the pen with the pig, waving a bottle of champagne, which she regarded with regal indifference. However, a piece of her dung got stuck to my shoe, and the stink lingered long after I had scraped it off and scrubbed the shoe with detergent. But in the end that too faded away. Sic transit gloria mundi.
