Mad John and the porkers

Now listen. There’s no way I’m making a big fuss about this.  I reckon I understand why it happened, and in many ways I suppose it was payback.

       All I’m saying is that my brother and I had it rough enough to begin with, knowing the market was against us and people were suspicious and staff were hard to come by. Oh yes, rough, indeed.

       But then it got a whole lot worse. No compensation, no welfare state, no comeback, no dole money, no housing benefit, no supplementary income top-up, no living allowances, no reduction in council tax. Sorry, I’m not really explaining this very well. Let’s go back a bit.

      

Sam and I knew it wasn’t the best place to run a business, but it started to work after a while. There were so many Jewish folk around on one side of the Sea of Galilee that we decided to set ourselves up on the other side, where there were at least a few people who might be interested in our products.

       We were having to do the whole thing: raise the animals and feed them; make sure the porkers were developing and healthy; we also had to arrange for the slaughtering, do the butchery and create the recipes for the meat products. And then there was the marketing and advertising and supplying the retail outlets. The abattoir was in another part of the town, but we kept the herd and cooked the produce at Rockface Meadows, on top of a cliff. We had two thousand porkers in that field, with a large building for them at night. Sam and I worked, cooked and slept there, too. Yes, it smelled a bit, but the pigs had to put up with us(!)

       It took a while to come up with the right name for the business. Each suggestion was weighed up for good and bad points thus:

Sam’s Hams

+ve   Easy to say; rhymes         -ve     Excludes most cuts of meat (& one owner)           ✗

The Gadarenes Flitch

+ve   Location; classy                  -ve     Tongue-twister; possibly jargon?                   ✗

Tacklin’ Cracklin’               

+ve   Whimsical; rhymes        -ve     Excludes products; too much punctuation       ✗

Seaside Sausages

+ve   Alliteration                         -ve     Excludes most products; sounds downmarket?        ✗

Catalogue of Hog              

+ve   Rhymes; inclusive            -ve     Somewhat clever-clever rhyme                         ✗

Posher Non-Kosher

+ve   Not cheap; rhymes          -ve     Only an eye-rhyme; emphasizes exclusion      ✗

Swine by the Brine            

+ve   Location (near sea); rhymes; whole hog       -ve     None                                                 ✔

Our range of different products and cuts of meat was extensive. There was breaded ham, honey-roast ham on the bone, wafer-thin sliced smoked ham, peppered ham, sweetcure ham and mustard-coated ham. Then there were bacon rashers and lardons, gammon steaks, loin roast, pancetta; sausages (with apple or apricot or sage or chilli, plus Cumberland, Lincolnshire and chorizo), chipolatas, hot dogs and saveloys; leg roast, black pudding, tenderloin and spare ribs. All this on top of the regular orders for pork chops (thick cut and thin cut), pork steaks, pork escallops, pork belly, pork pies, spam, spam, spam and spam. We also supplied some of those less-popular speciality items that go to prove the old claim ‘you can eat everything but the oink’: deep fried ears, the chitterlings (heart, liver, tripe, stomach), the lights (lungs), hog jowl, knuckles, trotters, and brawn (some call it head cheese).

       We cook it all from rooter to tooter.

Anyway, we had a few characters living near our farm. There was one old woman who used to get drunk regularly, and sang loudly long into the night. But she was harmless.

       There were a couple of crooks, who were infrequently visited by the Roman authorities, taken away for questioning, sent up before the beak and sent down to serve a few days in the slammer before returning, predictably, to commit the same crimes over again.

       But the one who caused us the most trouble was known locally (a little unkindly) as Mad John. He was, it has to be said, a general troublemaker right from the start, but on the occasion I’m telling you about, it was down to him that we met complete disaster.

       At first, he just frightened the children, but he got worse and worse (he became increasingly unhinged) so the locals demanded that he should be shackled and chained up like a dog. The authorities put irons on Mad John’s wrists and ankles, with long chains attached, fixed to a wall.

       This made all the townspeople feel safer but made Mad John even more dangerous. He would hurl himself at the wall sometimes, and shout at the top of his voice and scream and carry on most of the rest of the time, but it was impossible to tell what he was saying. It was just a noise. No-one tried to help him, because he was beyond the medical abilities of the local quacks, and a very long way beyond our patience, too.

       It wasn’t exactly care in the community – more a case of a community that didn’t know how to care. Every time anyone tried to help Mad John, he would try to bite them or tear their clothing or wet on them. Not nice. He’d behave in a way that discouraged anyone from trying to help next time. He didn’t know any better.

       It was very sad, really, but there was nothing anyone could do, was there?

As time went by Mad John seemed to get more powerful and have much shorter spells of calmness or rationality. The townspeople voted and agreed he should be moved out to the graveyard, which happened to be near the cliff, down by where we had our pig farm.

       He was restrained by two dozen men, chained to an ox cart and wheeled out to the graveyard, where the caves were. They chained him to a lump of solid rock, and he stayed put for a little while.

       But he grew stronger and more disturbed, and one night he broke free, and after that no-one could get hold of him.

       So he would run around in the graveyard, shouting, cutting his flesh with flints and bits of rusty metal and being very wild and scary. He often threw himself against the gravestones and onto the ground, perhaps in an attempt to loosen the shackles, but it didn’t have much effect apart from making his face and hands bleed. He looked very scary when he was bleeding. He couldn’t get out of the graveyard, since it was behind high walls, with a secure gate. Most of the time we couldn’t see him, but some days he would stand at the gate and scream and howl, and we simply had to put up with it.

       We often used to talk about him as we looked after the pigs, because his loud voice would carry across to where we were working. We didn’t talk to him, because he really wasn’t capable of a conversation.

It so happened that there was a general food shortage at that time, and (except for the wide-ranging and very tasty food products we were producing, of course) there wasn’t a lot to eat in those parts. Handy for us, you’d have thought…

       But the religious people were fussy, and it seemed like they would prefer to avoid even our very best prosciutto and go hungry rather than break religious food laws! Barmy.

Anyway, the day of the fuss started like most others: thirty five vats of rotting swill for the porkers; three or four dozen little piglets had to be trapped and taken off to the abattoir to have their throats slit; and there was a bit of sorting out needed to be done on account of that ragged Hebrew lad who was supposed to have been looking after some of them during the night.
    What a disaster he turned out to be! He just disappeared in the wee small hours. All he left was this note.

Came to my senses. Had to go home to my father, 

because I have sinned against heaven and against him, 

and say to him ‘I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ 

Sorry.  

Key to the pig pen is under the mat.    

Brian

Typical casual worker. Well, actually, not all that typical, but I mean, he had no staying power. Makes me grind my teeth.

       Anyway, Mad John started making a huge noise about something. He was often particularly upset just after a storm, and there had been a nasty one the night before, although it seemed to stop quite abruptly.

       Coincidentally, this teacher and magician bloke from Nazareth turned up. We’d heard a few things about him through the grapevine. Name of Jesus.

       Mad John screamed and screamed at him. I couldn’t make out what he was saying – something about God and torture; I don’t know.

       But this preacher looked at him and seemed remarkably calm and amazingly compassionate. He spoke quietly to him. I was too far away to hear what he said. This Jesus may have been the first person ever to talk to Mad John – at least, ever since he had become crazy.

       All of a sudden I was distracted from the conversation these two were having by a massive change that came over our pigs. They went berserk, I tell you. I don’t know what got into them, but they suddenly went absolutely bananas. They started squealing and fighting and trying to bite or climb over one another.

       Then – I know it sounds barmy, but this is how it looked – with one accord they all ran across the pigpen and barged through the fences. They acted as one unit, like a herd of stampeding bison. Pigs rarely behave like that, you know. But this lot galloped off at great speed, with loads of noise and scrambling in their urgent haste to get away. They ran down the hill towards the cliff, and just like proverbial lemmings, plunged over the edge and into the water.

       The whole jolly lot. Every hog, shoat and boar. Every farrow, sow and piglet. Every sausage, every chop, every rib, every slice of ham, every rasher of bacon, every curl of scratching: vamoose. All the pork bellies, cutlets and steaks, all the head cheese, all the chitterlings, trotters and tripe: submerged. Every hock, every ear, every tail, every oink: disappeared under the waves.

       All our livelihood. Gone.

       It was a long drop, and the water was deep there. Pigs can’t swim, although we discovered that they can float for a while. They all drowned.

        

So there we were, supposedly running a pig farm, but with no pigs. Rockface Meadows folded up that day. We had no insurance, no savings, no apologies, no job, no money, no chance.

       We made quite a fuss locally, but no-one seemed interested in our problems. They were too busy being amazed at the sudden change that had taken place in Mad John, or as they now called him, Strangely Mad-No-Longer John With The Nice Suit. I think we ought to have been pleased for him. But we weren’t.

       What’s very peculiar, and no-one has been able to explain this so far, is that John’s madness left him while he was talking to the healer. And it was at exactly the same time that this panic gripped upon our herd. He’d been like a man possessed, and then our pigs were behaving just as if…

       Anyway, thanks to Jesus, we were a whole lot worse-off than we’d been before. We never got to meet this bloke who single-handedly destroyed our farm and our business.

       Thanks a lot.

       But as I say, I reckon I understand the religious significance of it all, and I think we knew we were on a hiding to nothing establishing a pig farm from the outset.

So, our new venture is gong to be brilliant!

       We’ve teamed up with another bloke, name of Zebedee, who has lots of bounce and good ideas and all the gear we need.

       He used to run a fishing business with his sons until they cleared off to follow this Jesus, leaving him in the lurch with boats and nets and no staff. So with Zeb and his new fishermen, and us as chefs, we’ve agreed to launch a seafood restaurant on the beach near the Sea of Galilee. We’re calling it Alive Alive O.

       We can catch and cook all sorts: clams, crab sticks, scallops, oysters, shrimps, prawns, king prawns, tiger prawns, langoustines, squid, lobsters, winkles – and of course, cockles & mussels – plus all manner of fish – bass, bream, cod, dabs, eel, flounder, haddock, hake, halibut, herring, huss, mackerel, plaice, rainbow trout, red snapper, rock salmon, sole, stingray, tench, tuna, turbot, and whitebait. I’m not sure how many of them you can catch here, but they should go down reasonably well with the locals (well, probably a bit better than all that pork).

       So we’ve started building a three-storey restaurant on a lovely stretch by the shore. Sam and I wondered if it was wise to build it on sand, but we did it anyway.

       It’s near the water, with a fantastic view, well-equipped kitchens and somewhere to gut the fish and shuck the oysters and other places to dry the nets and keep the boats and all that.

       Watch out for our adverts!

Officially foolish entrepreneurs

What was the attitude of the pig farmers 

towards the local people, their religion, and the Lord Jesus?

Why did Jesus send the evil spirits into the pigs?

Which other Bible stories or parables are referred to 

in this sorry tale of hopeless businessmen?