I love the smell of bacon in the morning

Piggies!

I've started my two weeks working with pigs up on the farm in Milton, owned by the College of West Anglia. Milton's about 20 minutes' drive from Cambridge, so I'm having to get the bus in the mornings - I initially ran down from the house to the bus bay in the city centre, then discovered the first place it stopped was at a roadside bus stop at the bottom of the hill, about 5 minutes' walk from my front door. The bus driver also seemed fairly reluctant to actually go into Milton - when letting passengers off at the bus stop literally just beyond the road sign marking the start of the village, he looked around to see who was left on the bus, and gave me and the other passenger present an "oh, you lazy buggers" glare before continuing.

Once I eventually found the farm and changed into my stylish green boiler suit with matching wellies, we started feeding the pigs. Remember the various scary reptile noises in the Jurassic Park films? A fairly big chunk of those are reproduced by pigs fighting to get into the feeding cubicles, and the breeding sows we were feeding are at the full-grown Large White pig size, i.e. much bigger and heavier than a man. On the first time doing the job it's very difficult to persuade yourself that opening the gates for them isn't going to lead to some kind of horrible mauling via a pig being overexcited enough to jump the gate and trample you to get to that bag of feed...

Next up was feeding and cleaning out the farrowing sows (= sows with piglets), which was less scary but fairly smelly, as you'd expect. The piglets have shown an obsessive, nibbly interest in my wellies if I stand still in the box for any length of time, e.g. when feeding the sow. It feels odd. I'm not quite sure what they find so fascinating about them.

The outdoor farrowing boxes are given straw bedding to help keep the pigs warm, and putting in fresh straw is actually a really enjoyable job since it leads directly to getting to watch the piglets' reaction: mother pig is stood up eating, piglets are milling about, a chunk of straw is thrown in and lands on top of the piglets. Piglets bark what is clearly an "argh wtf?!" and scoot away a bit, then realise there is new straw and become a lot happier, skittering up and down the box at top speed (actually reaching respectable acceleration for such a small space) in a game of Wheeheehee I've Got Straw No You Don't Oi Give It Back.

Also spent time watching and waiting on a sow who was about to farrow - once she'd started, after getting out a stillborn which was possibly jamming things up, the piglets pretty much just kept falling out of her. It was a bit odd to watch - the number of pigs made it kind of like watching popcorn being made at the cinema.

Hmm, piggy popcorn. Interesting.