What are we having for tea tonight, daddy? Are we cooking Bluebell? "Pork chops" and "yes", I replied to five-year-old Martha, who cheerfully returned to the delights of Pokemon Red, curiosity assuaged. I continued mopping the kitchen table, scene of Bluebell's final dissection into tenderloins, hams, trotters, ribs and the aforementioned chops. What was left of the liver pate made the night before was cold and set in the fridge, and the dogs had dealt with heart and lungs. And I felt vaguely sick. Maybe it was leaving the gall bladder in with the liver while boiling it, until my anatomically informed wife realised and ripped the offending organ free.
I did not expect to become a butcher. Never, during my late hedonistic flowering in the dodgy world of 1980s Glaswegian pop'n'role-play, did I envisage owning a brace of shotguns and a monstrous, 1950s captive-bolt humane killer, to say nothing of the sheep, the pigs, the hens and the gigantic, intimidating cleaver. Crofting was never in my thoughts as I blagged my way into the likes of the Sub Club way back when Wet Wet Wet were still unsigned, Hue and Cry had yet to mention Noam Chomsky in an interview and Lloyd Cole still had his Commotions to keep his fringe floppily in check.
Yet here I am, checking the freezer bags where Bluebell, the Vietnamese Pot- Bellied/Kune Kune cross, is now temporarily resting. Apart from the chops. They will soon be sizzling under the grill.
I don't really know how it happened, this crofting stuff. Well, I know what the system of land tenure called crofting is about, roughly. Only about three people in the country know every jot and tittle of its arcane law and lore, but basically it was established to provide security of tenure for the smallholders who had in the past been cleared from their traditional patches of land by unscrupulous, post-tribal lairds. Read any book by the historian, now Highlands and Islands Enterprise chairman, Jim Hunter to find out more. They're essentially all the same.
As for me, I fell into it. There was a house for sale, like many in the remote areas of Shetland, very cheaply, and with it came a dozen or so acres of land and a share in the common grazings. Next minute, sheep, pigs and green wellies had arrived. And a copy of John Seymour's seminal masterpiece Self Sufficiency.
First published in 1975, this is the book that tells you everything about living off the land, from farming carp in pools to making methane-generators and, crucially, how to butcher pigs, sheep, cows and rabbits. It is messy, in places fantastical, but also very practical indeed when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of home meat production. Our copy is heavily stained with blood and other, thankfully unidentifiable, organic matter.
Ah, but surely killing pigs at home is illegal? Not in crofting townships, when it's for your own consumption. And my vague nausea now is, I feel, a fair price to pay for knowing that Bluebell (who was a monstrously unpleasant, aggressive pig, it should be said) died not knowing anything other than that the usual bucket of food had arrived. Bang, a slice of the carotid (no black puddings in our house, I'm afraid) and it was straight from free range to swine heaven. The first pigs we "took off", to use local parlance, we captured, hobbled and transported 50 miles to the nearest slaughterhouse. I swore then I would never put an animal through that again.
Instead, we put ourselves through the whole process of killing, butchering and bagging. The children have not been introduced to the bloody awfulness of the process, but when they ask how it occurs, or why Bluebell is no longer rampaging through our neighbour's neeps, we tell them.
My queasiness is soon taken care of by a large Old Pulteney, anyway. And the pork chops? Delicious.
