I have a phobia when it comes to odd spoons or forks that mysteriously appear in our cutlery drawer. I fear they might have been licked by a pig.
Is there a name for this phobia? ‘Spoonerism’ has been taken so I’ll just call it ‘what the fork?’ in the interim.
I know this type of horrible thing is very unlikely to occur these days.
But when I was a boy in the mid-60s it was very, very likely to happen.
I was reminded of this today when I was filling in a scrapbook my 27-year-old son gave me for Christmas. I’m populating it with snippets of family history, anecdotes, observations, old photographs of me, my parents, him as a toddler etc. I’m doing a little bit each week and my aim is to give it back to him next Christmas.
While doing this, I remembered we had a neighbour who used to collect food scraps to feed to pigs — coincidentally the pigs he shared with my uncle at a piggery about 14km away.
It wasn’t just us. The whole street left out pig tins just for him and he’d tip them into drums on his trailer. I don’t know how the operation got council permission. Or got past health laws. But I guess people just didn’t worry about such things in those days. It was a good way of recycling before recycling had even been coined.
I’m not sure I should tell you about the next bit because technically it’s probably theft and I don’t want you to squeal on me.
When plates were scraped into the bins, the odd teaspoon or fork would fall in, too.
I’m not sure if these items were intercepted at the time of feeding the swill to the pigs, or they were left over in their troughs when the food was gone.
But I know my uncle or auntie returned a share of the booty to us.
You might call it silver service. We always had odds and sods in our cutlery drawer. I doubt knives and forks were cheap in those days, so it was a real saving.
It just scarred me psychologically.
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JOHN MARTIN 