Pigging it up

I was talking yesterday at an Ordnance Survey conference. Don't ask me what it was all about, but if you're in marketing you know that maps are very important for targeting.

Although many people liked my usual selection of tawdry jokes, the best speaker of the day was Gerald Ratner. If you ever get a chance to see him, do. Absolutely hilarious and wonderfully self-deprecating.

(For those who don't know who Gerald Ratner is - get on the internet. He is a very unlucky man, really.)

I was told they were going to have a Hog Roast the night before the conference, but I couldn't make it. I'm a pig for hogs and I was sulking about this till I learned that the swine in question didn't turn up.

Two footnotes on the subject of swine (you can guess some of what's coming, can't you?)

1. I see most of the pigs in Parliament still can't tell the difference between right and wrong - especially Gordon Brown, who condemns one person (Hazel Blears) for doing something almost identical to what he condones in another (Hoon - a slimy creep, by the way - I was in a meeting with him years ago).

2. My dear friend Daz Valladares who is from those parts tells me that in Kalina, a Bombay suburb, they used to have the festival of St. Roque. Part of the fun was a game where the men of the village formed a circle within which a pig was set free. The person who captured it was allowed to take it home.

Concerns about Swine Flu caused this harmless East Indian custom to be abandoned. What a shame.

Daz says he went to school with someone from Kalina, and "it used to be a quiet place with tamarind trees and quarries which used to fill up with salt water when the tide came in. These were crystal clear and deep ponds. I enjoyed swimming in them."

There is something very touching and sad about that, don't you think? Not as sad as the way even small places far from anywhere are being persecuted by bureaucratic idiots. They are probably related to the idiots who destroyed the homes of those two adorable Slumdog kids.