Sad to say, if you’ve been enjoying her efforts to run a phone service, this is the last outing for Uncle Reg’s niece. I only wrote six half hour radio plays and once they were rejected, as I had nowhere else to send them, I stopped. I had spent many hours reading them aloud, recording and timing everything with a stop watch. Words were pruned to forge a fit. However, there are still two of Archaeology Now to go and then six of the piece de resistance, each about a quarter of an hour’s worth of play and a heck of a lot of typing. I think I may have originally done them all on a borrowed word processor, not by any means my most antediluvian hot metal word machine. I still have the office-sale typewriter I was bought at the age of eight on the basis that being female I was likely to work in a typing pool. As the machine in question has no semi colon, I was probably headed for more of a typing puddle. Could be worse. Could be on a pig farm.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Story of the day.
Dialling tone. Quick burst of nursery music.
Uncle Reg’s Niece Hello, youngster, this is the Uncle Reg story time phone service. Reg Smith is the two oh one oh doodah thingy calling. Before I can tell you the story you must ask permission from the person who pays the phone bill because it’s polite and because you’ll cop it if you don’t.
Another quick burst of nursery music.
Uncle Reg’s Niece The story for today is the three little pigs. Once upon a time there was three little pigs. Three is not many for a litter, perhaps the sow had a poor diet. Anyway. There was three little pigs. All on their own. Abandoned. So they decided to build a house. That’s silly really because pigs live in sties if they’re on an old fashioned farm or in the field with corrugated huts if it’s modern. Some of ours are modern, though the little ones are in the barn. The bacon pigs are all in the fields though. Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, should I? Forget I said it. And I won’t mention lard at all. Even though we have got a barn full of it. Not the barn the pigs are in, of course. You couldn’t keep fat off dead pigs and live pigs in the same barn. Well you could, but it wouldn’t be advisable. Or very clean.
Anyway, youngster, the three little pigs were building houses, not that they could because they’ve got the wrong sort of hands. Well they haven’t got any hands at all really, they’re all feet. They couldn’t pick up a trowel or anything. Though they must have done in the story. Well it is only a story, I suppose. All about pigs written by someone who knew nothing about pigs, not one thing. Daft really. I expect it was written before modern farming advances and that.
Anyway, the first pig builds his house out of straw. The second pig builds his house out of wood. I’d like to see a pig with a saw, very fanciful. And the third pig uses bricks. Even more fanciful. And this wolf comes along and he says ‘I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down’. That’s rubbish too because wolves can’t talk but that’s what happens in the story and the wolf blows the straw house down. So the pig that was in the straw house goes to live with the pig that built the wooden house.
That must have been annoying. Just when he’s got his wooden house all nicely built with curtains up and a nice sofa and the telephone in and that; his relatives come to stay. I don’t mind them coming but why is it that when they get first choice of the biscuits they always pick the nice one with the silver paper on? You never get visitors going ‘Ooh, a custard cream,’ and picking that, do you? Oh well, never mind. I do a bit though because we only ever have ones with silver paper on when we’ve got visitors.
So, youngster, the wolf says to the two little pigs in the wooden house, ‘ I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down,’ and he does. Actually you couldn’t have pigs in wooden houses anyway, they would knock them down themselves. They’re ever so strong you know. And fast when they get up to a run. I had to go in Beatrice’s pen to get a piglet out that she was sitting on and she got mad and ran at me. I had to jump the barrier ever so fast. And that’s metal that is. Not straw or wood. Pigs would smash straw or wood all by themselves. They can be quite destructive, pigs.
So the three little pigs are all in the brick house. I wonder who got the silver paper biscuits when there were three of them? The first two pigs, I expect. The third pig would have to wait and be polite because it was his house. He would have to hand them round and the other pigs would go ‘Ooh, silver paper biscuits, I’ll have one of them,’ and there wouldn’t be any left for him. Sad, really. You do feel quite sad when you never get the silver paper ones. I would really appreciate them, more than other people who just scoff them quickly. I would eat them very, very slowly. All round the edges and taste them a lot. I sometimes think silver paper biscuits are wasted on other people.
Anyway, there the three little pigs are in the brick house, youngster. And the bad wolf comes along and says, unrealistically, again, ‘I’ll huff and puff and blow your house down.’ So he huffs and puffs but he can’t blow the house down because it’s made of bricks. That’s a lie, too. When the elm tree got blown down in a gale it utterly demolished the dairy. There was just this tiny corner of it left. We weren’t using it as a dairy, though, we were using it as a feed store. We’re still waiting for the insurance to come through. That’s why we’ve got all these pig vitamins in the kitchen. There’s sacks and sacks of them all piled up. I’m surprised the pigs eat them really. They don’t taste very nice, not even the pink ones.
Anyway the pigs in the story didn’t have vitamins so they ate the wolf instead. And that is the story of the three little pigs, youngster. There will be another story tomorrow and if I can find the book, which is here somewhere, it’ll be Cinderella. But don’t ring before lunch because I’ve got to sweep the yard tomorrow morning. We had a mass pig escape because someone forgot to shut a door; you wouldn’t believe the mess in the yard by the time we got them all back in. They’re evil sometimes, pigs are. I don’t blame the wolf at all, they get on my wick too.
Anyway, thank you caller, Uncle Reg is the twenty doodah calling.
Click brrrr.
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
JaneLaverick.com – starting a pig of a week with a biscuit and hoping this week you get your share of the silver paper ones.