I miss quite a few things from London. Mainly my eldest daughter, but there are other less important, things. Pubs. Guinness. Pig.

You cannot get any pork product out where I am. No bacon butties, no pork pies, no ham sandwiches.

I miss pig.

So last year I was very pleased to learn that the mechanic who looked after our car had a side line. He hunts. And he turned up at the door with a dead pig.

He complained that carrying the pig down the hill nearly broke his back, but I took very little notice of this wondering instead how I was going to butcher a pig.

(Luckily he brought along a friend who skinned it, cleaned it and cut it into legs and body, leaving me the relatively easy bit of cutting the meat up.)

This year we got rid of the car and bought a new one, so we hadn’t talked to the mechanic for a while. Then he rang up with the offer of another pig.

I should have taken more notice of his complaint about his back.

A friend had killed the pig and offered it to him but this year he wanted me to go with him to get it. The idea was to butcher it in situ and bring it down in pieces. I said OK, because I like pig.

So he turned up with his cousin, who would butcher the pig, at about four o’clock one evening last week. Then we drove up into the mountains, pausing only to pick up his mate who had killed the pig and so knew where it was.

His mate got into the car with a rifle. At this point I was wondering how dead the pig was but didn’t ask any questions. Actually I couldn’t ask any questions. My Turkish and their English wasn’t up to that level of questioning. I couldn’t even ask if the gun was loaded which was the main question on my mind as I was sat in the back and he was sitting in front of me with the gun over his shoulder pointing right at me.

We drove up to the main road, then off the main road onto a side road, then off the side road onto a small road, then off the small road onto a track, then off the track onto what, to my untrained foreign eye, looked very much like a footpath. At each transition the road got bumpier but the car didn’t slow down much. We were merrily bounced about in the back, which didn’t bother me in the slightest.

What did bother me was the rifle pointing at me, also bouncing up and down.

Have you seen Pulp Fiction? John Travolta casually turns around to talk to the guy in the back of a car whilst holding a gun, the car goes over a bump, the gun goes off and the guy in the back gets his head splattered all over the car. Which leads to an amusing section of the film, where they have to get rid of the body and clean up the car, but the actor playing the guy in the back didn’t play much part in those scenes. As the guy in the back I was hoping for a much bigger role.

Well finally we stop and get out. I got out so quickly it took me some time to take in where we were. We were up a wooded mountainside and it was getting dark. It was now about five and the sun had set.

We got the butchering knives and buckets and bowls in which to carry the meat back out of the car and then started walking up a path in the forest.

Path is a perhaps not the right phrase to use here. Path of least resistance is more accurate. Up, though is definitely right.

After twenty minutes I was knackered and it must have showed as I was sat down in a clearing and gestured to wait. Fine by me. The hunting party kept going.

So now I was sitting in the dark up a mountain. I had no idea where I was and only slightly knew the people I was with, who had guns and knives and who had left me behind.

It was… beautiful. The night was clear, the forest was silent and other worldly and the view wonderful. I felt totally at peace and comfortable.

Twenty minutes later they came back, with the back haunch of the pig. They had had trouble with the walk/climb and terrain as well and had decided not to try and cart the whole thing down the mountainside. We trekked back to the car and went home, where the cousin cleaned the meat up and us out of beer.

I am sitting up late at night watching videos on the computer. MyWife is asleep but if she got up and walked in on me watching these videos I think she'd have every right to be upset.

They are Kirsty MacColl videos.

To say I worship her is an overstatement. Just. My eldest daughter is named after her. I met her a couple of times at gigs. For me she had everything. Talent, looks, attitude. She even overcame one of the most  crippling handicaps known to man - she came from south of the river.

I love my daughters, and my wife. And my family and friends. But Kirsty is something else. I get annoyed at MyWife when she gets upset with me for imaginary things but Kirsty MacColl...

I miss her. RIP Kirsty.

Back in the dim distant past when I was a young, naive, idealistic teacher (that is last month) I started each class by asking the kids, in English, "What is your name?". This served the dual purpose of seeing if they could speak any English and finding out their names. Genius, eh?

All was going reasonably well until a boy in the 6th year (11 year olds) stood up and announced in the full Brian Blessed:

"I AM UNDERTAKER"

I stil don't know if he had any idea what he was actually saying but it was a definite omen as far as the 6th were concerned.